The Norman Conquests
Opening Night: April 24, 2009
Closing: July 26, 2009
Theater: Circle in the Square
The Norman Conquests Trilogy is a delightful marathon; all three plays — Living Together, Round and Round the Garden and Table Manners — are performed in one daylong session (with breaks, naturally). Three interlocking, but independent comedies show the same story — Norman attempts a tryst with his wife’s sister in the family’s country home — from three different perspectives: the things that happen in the dining room, the things that happen in the living room and the things that happen in the garden. All three shows will be performed in the Trilogy marathon.
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April 24, 2009
“Oh” is not widely acknowledged as one of the funniest words in English. Nor does the simple “aah” generally induce convulsive giggles. Yet these unassuming monosyllables acquire brute force in the topping, London-born revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Norman Conquests,” crippling you with laughter that shakes the body and, more subversively, fractures the soul.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
Ayckbourn’s plays, first seen on Broadway in 1975, are as rueful as they are riotous, a rare combination that has been fully realized here. Their titles _ "Table Manners," "Living Together" and "Round and Round the Garden" _ make them sound as if they are stock sitcoms. They’re not.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
To see or not to see the entire trilogy…that is the question. You won’t offend Alan Ayckbourn if you don’t see every part (Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden); he constructed each 1973 comedy as a stand-alone evening: ”Any suggestion that it was essential to see all three plays to appreciate any one of them would probably result in no audience at all,” he says in the preface to Conquests’ published edition.
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April 22, 2014
Woody Allen in his prime was a great proponent of the theory that comedies should do the job in 90 minutes. Thankfully, Alan Ayckbourn must have missed that memo. Over seven hours of hilarious peaks and contemplative valleys, his 1973 trilogy "The Norman Conquests" delivers more laughs than ought to be legal while steadily expanding our perspective on the needling dissatisfaction beneath the comic chaos of his characters’ lives. There’s no such lack of audience fulfillment in the richly rewarding revival transferring from London’s Old Vic, its structural ingenuity matched by an exceptional cast and by the supple modulations of Matthew Warchus’ direction.
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April 22, 2014
"I think other people’s marriages are invariably a source of amazement," Ruth (Amelia Bullmore) says during Living Together, one of three plays that make up Alan Ayckbourn’s rollicking trilogy, The Norman Conquests, now at the Circle in the Square after an earlier run at London’s Old Vic Theatre.
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