Kenneth Hurren on Ayckbourn pulling the strings
The Norman Conquests, a trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn (Greenwich Theatre) Cymbeline by William Shakespeare; Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-upon-Avon) Tooth of Crime by Sam Shepard (Royal Court, Sloane Square) The Snowdroppers by Alun Richards (Hampstead Theatre Club) The three comedies that constitute Alan Ayckbourn's remarkable trilogy can, according to their author's programme note, "be seen in any order since, like a three-ended ball of string, it doesn't really matter where you start to unravel." I wish he hadn't said that. I was beguiled into a reckless belief in the impossible.
Ayckbourn's accomplishment, in making three separate hilarious entertainments from precisely the same set of events and circumstances, is masterly enough without his contention that there is any such thing as a three-ended ball of string. There is a fourth end in there somewhere, the last, to come to light. Ayckbourn produces it in the last scene of the third play, Round and Round the Garden, and I suspect that it does matter, very much, that this play (which goes on slightly beyond the time when Table Manners and Living Together have finished) should not be seen before the other two. For one thing there is its small but vital extension of the events with which all three are concerned; and for another, its opening scenes are really not very
funny in themselves but only become so through foreknowledge of the characters involved in them.
Anyone lacking this foreknowledge might well be as con fused as you unquestionably are by this review which, as a sort of demonstration, I have begun at the wrong end.
I thus appreciate your difficulty, not really quite grasping the idea of this unique trilogy. John Hopkins, I believe, wrote a highly acclaimed set of plays for television in which the same situation was explored, successively, from the viewpoint of each of the people who figured in it. That, however, is an approach with far more scope, allowing variations in such matters as motive, characterisation and dramatic development. Ayckbourn varies none of these elements, but only the settings — successively, the dining room, living room and garden of a modest, vicarage-type house in the country — in which the situation reveals and resolves itself; and in his thrice-told tale he allows himself, making his feat the more astonishing, a minimum of complications.
The story has to do with the relationships of six people during the course of a summery weekend, and rather particularly with the mild havoc wreaked upon the attitudes and dispositions of ,five of them by the sixth, a mischievous odd-ball named Norman who is, as the phrase goes, catnip to the ladies. I accept the assurances of various ladies of my own acquaintance that Tom Courtenay, who plays him, makes him seem as appealing and lovable as his author intends, for most of Ayckbourn's structure depends on his being able to get away with the kind of transparently flattering mush that any sensible girl would ordinarily treat with the deepest suspicion.
At the outset of the proceedings, Norman turns up to bear away his sister-in-law, Annie (played by Felicity Kendal with a captivating blend of diffidence and roguishness), for a sporty weekend, which is to be her respite from a humdrum life as nurse-companion to an ailing mother, and from the maddeningly undemonstrative, unprogressive, doggy devotion of Tom, the local vet (Michael Gambon). Annie has asked her brother Reg (Mark Kingston) and his wife Sarah (Penelope Keith) to take over mother and the house in her absence. This proves a mistake, for Sarah high-handedly declines to be party to the arrangements. Norman's career-girl wife Ruth (Penelope Wilton) also shows up and an uneasy weekend is had by all. Norman, his generous romantic nature evidently insufficiently satisfied by his wife, and thwarted in his designs upon her sister, makes tentative and not unwelcome advances to the formidable Sarah.
There isn't a happy ending in sight for anyone. Emotionally, the plays, like love, are a package deal of pleasure and pain, but no one is left actually bleeding and it is the pleasure that lingers in memory, along with the perfection of the ensemble playing under Eric Thompson's direction (I would not easily forgive a single change in the cast when the plays move, as they must, to the West End), and the joy of savouring Ayckbourn's comic craftsmanship.
It is hardly possible to speak so favourably (or, indeed, temperately) of Shakespeare's Cymbeline — for the most part, a ragbag of ideas, situations and characters better dealt with in other works by the same author — but John Barton and his confederates at Stratford have hacked out some particularly dismaying stretches and taken so amiable and jocular a line with it all that it becomes tolerable and even enjoyable.
Just to nudge your memory, this is the one about an obscure and probably fictitious British king named Cymbeline, his political differences with the occupying Romans, and his assorted personal troubles which include the abduction of two infant sons (discovered two decades later as cavedwellers). He also has a daughter, Imogen, sadly traduced by an unscrupulous rascal with whom her husband has wagered upon her chastity; a stepson, Cloten, a species of sex maniac who is rather amusingly beheaded by one of the long-lost sons; and a malevolent wife who has sometimes reminded scholars of Lady Macbeth but who reminds me, frivolously I daresay, of the wicked queen in Snow White. The text encourages a certain extravagance of interpretation by all hands, and in the prevailing atmosphere Susan Fleetwood does well to find a touch or two of genuine pathos in the plight of the put-upon Imogen. The production on the whole may prove disconcerting to anyone who thinks of the play as vaguely tragic in essence, but a yarn that relies so heavily on outrageously melodramatic development and at one point calls for the entrance of Jupiter astride an eagle throwing thunderbolts (as a reasonable compromise here, the god descends in a glittering golden orb and skips the thunderbolts) is not to be taken quite seriously.
At the Royal Court, Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime is ritual drama with hard-rock music, in which an ageing boss-man named Hoss is toppled by an unsavoury young rival named Crow, following a duel conducted mostly in aggressive songs. They behave generally like gangsters, but I don't know that they're supposed to be specifically in any particular
Spectator June 15, 1974
line of business: microphone to microphone they could be pop stars, highball to highball they could be PR men. I caught an amusing line or two, but most of the language was over my head, and if there is any allegorical significance in the fact that Mike Pratt plays Hoss as a hard-bitten American, while Richard O'Brien plays Crow as an oily Cockney, I fear it eluded me.
I was more taken with The Snowdroppers, which deals in tandem with the unlikely topics of nationalist fanaticism and lingerie fetishism. So full of surprises as almost to preclude discussion, but it is tautly directed by Roger Williams, and admirably played by Ronald Lewis, Fiona Walker and Roger Gartland, and is worth two hours of anyone's time.
Previous page
