The Norman Conquests (The Old Vic)

Three plays make up Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy: Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden. This bold, brilliant revival at the Old Vic is a huge waving peacock feather in the cap of its director, Matthew Warchus, as well as the artistic director, Kevin Spacey.

Written in 1973, the plays treat middle-class marriage, adultery and frustration on an epic scale, with Ayckbourn’s hypersensitive comic antennae perfectly balanced by compassion. After seven hours in their company, we know the six characters here in mesmerising detail, each one of them dishonest, selfish, more or less unhappy and painfully, recognisably human. We know them so intimately, too, because the trilogy is staged in the round. The Old Vic has been made new, seats ripped up and drawn in, leaving nothing to focus on but the actors before our eyes.

Norman, the compulsive seducer, has the soul of an Italian that has somehow transmigrated into the body of a bearded assistant librarian from Sussex. Ayckbourn is the playwright laureate of English loneliness, melancholy and infinite longing, all boiling away beneath a thin, frigid crust of niceness and reserve. In Norman, however, he has created a catalytic central figure who does nothing but express his emotions and desires, loudly and without embarrassment. The effect on a polite weekend house party is electrifying.

Norman likes to picture himself as something like Rhett Butler, tall, broad-shouldered and manly, with “a chuckle in his voice, a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step”. In reality, as played by Stephen Mangan, he’s shambling, slack-bellied, drunk, emotionally needy and with the big, sad brown eyes of a seal pup about to be clubbed to death — which works powerfully on tender female hearts. Add to this his habit of declaring “I love you” and “I just want to make you happy” to anything in a skirt, and it’s a full-on emotional mugging that succeeds every time.

No, Norman is no obvious ladykiller, but that only makes Ayckbourn’s psychological acuity more fascinating. Instead of the obvious sensual relish for the world of a Casanova, Norman is more likely to whine: “I think I’ve got one of my depressions coming on.” He’s married to the hard-faced workaholic Ruth (Amelia Bullmore), but it’s his wife’s sister, Annie, who is the primary object of his seductive self-pity. Annie is unmarried, so her destiny is to care for Mother upstairs. Played by Jessica Hynes, co-creator of the wonderful television comedy Spaced, she’s a picture of self- neglect and sexual frustration. We never meet Mother, but you soon have a vivid image of her as some kind of Minotaur or Medusa up in the attic, a voracious man-eater in her time, and now eating away the life of her daughter.

The third sibling is the skinny, ferrety, mustachioed Reg (Paul Ritter), in his tight white Terylene slacks, a male chauvinist piglet to the marrow. His wife, Sarah, beautifully played by Amanda Root, is the classic mix of prudish and prurient, seeing the beast with two backs lurking in every corner. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, preach.

The sextet is completed by Ben Miles, as Tom, the gentle, awkward, utterly useless vet who might just, one day, pluck up the courage to ask Annie out. Cleverly cast as by far the best-looking of the three men, Miles nevertheless radiates negative sexuality and stammering nonpassion. His decency is exceeded only by his dullness. Even the neat way he rolls up his shirtsleeves is eloquent. Irene Bohan’s costumes are perfectly expressive throughout.

Ayckbourn’s wit is like sunlight glinting on Loch Ness, dancing and dazzling, but you’re always aware of the abyss of melancholy beneath, miles deep. Merely quoting the lines can hardly capture how painfully funny they are in performance. “There’s nothing sordid about East Grinstead.” Or Sarah on her husband: “How is Reg?” “Oh, he’s still Reg, you know.” (Long pause of buttoned-up despair.) “I’ve tried.”

There’s further pleasure to be had from Ayckbourn’s characteristic playing with time and structure, for the action of the three plays in fact takes place simultaneously, in three places. This adds ingenious new layers of laughter and poignancy to the immaculate and generous ensemble acting, with comic timing so precise, it must have been done to an atomic clock. Despite the laughs, however, you’re still left feeling that the gulf between the sexes is almost unbridgeable. Husbands and wives stand on opposite sides of a vast chasm, shouting across to each other. Only the occasional word is understood; the rest are carried away on the wind. Yet love still makes it across. Sometimes.

No Man's Land (Duke of York's Theatre)

Another big revival from the 1970s is Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, first performed in 1975 at the Old Vic. It’s not Pinter’s best, and you wonder why a director of Rupert Goold’s stature bothered with it. Seeing it the day after The Norman Conquests only made it appear even more meagre and ungenerous in comparison. The wealthy Hirst (Michael Gambon) is visited by a penurious poet, Spooner (David Bradley), who he knew long ago at Oxford. Or did he? You don’t quite know, but you don’t quite care, either, even though you never tire of watching these two actors, with their lived-in faces and their beautiful delivery. Bradley’s vague, smiling malice and down-at-heel shuffle are a delight, while Gambon looks like a man baffled by the world, but quite cosy in his bafflement. The two minor characters are Hirst’s thugs, played by David Walliams and Nick Dunning. They act as if they’ve read that Pinter is supposed to be menacing, so menacing they do, and nothing else.

The real weakness, however, is the play. This is Pinter at his thinnest, least structured and most aimless: narrow range, wandering, elliptical, cul-de-sac conversations, a total lack of emotional investment or risk. Goold’s treatment feels intensely respectful, which doesn’t help. You might want to view the play as a metaphor for the way art subserves the dominant ideology, or an allegory of Pinter’s usual beef, the operations of power. But it’s all rather simplistic and silly, and not helped by the programme featuring four of Craig Brown’s cruelly brilliant parodies of Pinter’s “political” poems. Then you look more closely and, no, they are Pinter’s political poems! Oh, dear.

The Norman Conquests Old Vic, SE1

No Man’s Land Duke of York’s, WC2

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