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an interview with The Norman Conquest's Jessica Hynes
The Norman Conquests has been responsible for a rare instance of actual
rolling in the aisles. “That’s true,” says Michael Gambon. “I saw a bloke
fall out of his seat in the dress circle and roll down.”
Gambon was on stage at the time, seated at a dining table on a chair that was
too low for his character, a stolid vet called Tom. “There was so much
laughter in that particular scene, the six of us used to just stop acting.
We just sat there and had to wait – sometimes an alarmingly long time. I
could control that laughter by getting lower in my seat.”
This was in 1974. Most of the young cast – which included Felicity Kendal,
Penelope Keith, Tom Courtenay and (for the initial run in Greenwich)
Penelope Wilton – have long become part of the national furniture. Indeed,
it was thanks to their sparring as sisters-in-law in The Norman Conquests
that Keith and Kendal were rematched in the hit television series The Good
Life. If the capital’s audiences have seen a lot of the cast since, however,
they have seen nothing of the show that helped to launch several careers.
There’s a reason for that. Two, in fact.
The larger one is that The Norman Conquests is not one play. It’s a trilogy,
in which Alan Ayckbourn explored for the first time his taste for playing
clever tricks with time and space. Set over a single weekend, the three
plays observe from three parts of a suburban house a disastrous family
gathering, during which one member of the party – the insufferable, charming
and free-spirited librarian Norman – seduces his wife’s sister, his
brother-in-law’s wife and, most surprisingly of all, his own wife. Table
Manners is set in the dining room, Living Together among the soft
furnishings, Round and Round the Garden amid the herbaceous borders. It thus
presents a daunting hurdle for commercial producers, who run the risk of
having not one flop on their hands, but three. Even though Ayckbourn argued
that the plays could be seen individually on their Scarborough premiere in
1973, that was not how audiences responded when the trilogy went down to
Greenwich and, with the wind in its sails, to the West End.
They work together, according to Amelia Bullmore, who appears as Norman’s
wife, Ruth, in the plays’ revival at the Old Vic, precisely because “you
catch a trace of a weather system of another play. People come in full of
something that is unexplained, but that’s what life is like”.
In 1974, this didn’t convince most commercial producers. As Kendal recalls:
“Several were dubious that people would come to see the same story on three
different evenings. They did say that, depending on the success of the
piece, they would probably take [to the West End] the one people liked best.
But once we put them in front of an audience, it became clear you couldn’t
separate them.”
The other reason for the trilogy’s long sabbatical is that there was never any
need to revive old Ayckbourn – his new works were always making their way
south. Then, some time after the single cast of House/Garden occupied the
two main houses of the National in 2000, the playwright fell out of love
with a London theatre world in hock to modern market forces. “Once big money
is involved, it’s not fun,” he says. “So far as I know, we now have about
four or five actors who can actually fill theatres. Otherwise, you take
punts on strange people from gardening programmes or film stars with no
voice.”
It was a film star, though, who schlepped up to Scarborough to persuade
Ayckbourn out of his intransigence. The result is that Kevin Spacey’s Old
Vic is trying to reconquer The Norman Conquests. The director, Matthew
Warchus, has cast it to the hilt, with actors experienced in everything from
Pinter to sitcom.
That does not cloud a slightly neurotic awareness of those spectral
performances from 1974. “When I heard Michael Gambon had done it,” says Ben
Miles, best known for the BBC sex farce Coupling, “I did think, ‘Jesus . . .
well, that’s obviously that part played definitively.’ ” “I can’t help
feeling that they must have been better than us,” says Jessica Hynes,
co-creator of Spaced, who inherits the part of Annie from Kendal. “It’s
quite hard to fill those sexy shoes.” It’s Annie who sets the plot rolling
when, long tired of waiting for a proposal from Tom, she arranges a dirty
weekend with Norman, only to be discovered when her prissy sister-in-law
Sarah arrives with her henpecked husband, Reg, to look after Mother (a
bedridden nymphomaniac who we never meet). “I have felt a strong sense of
Penelope Keith,” says Amanda Root, who plays Sarah, “It took me a while to
start seeing myself playing the character, but you just have to make it your
own.”
Easier said than done. Norman himself, once played by Courtenay, is now
enticingly in the hands of Stephen Mangan, who in Green Wing and elsewhere
has cornered the market in cocksure prats. Norman is a tricky customer, not
only for those around him, but for the actor who has to work him out. “It’s
not like Lear,” Courtenay recalls, “but I found it difficult at first.”
Mangan, too, has found it hard to get to grips with Norman: “He never
completely reveals who he is; I’m not sure he knows himself. He’s a love
bomber. He sprays his love over any woman who comes within walking distance
of him. His need for approval and appetite for drama are insatiable. I
figured he’s probably the youngest by about 10 years of a large family, and
got a huge amount of attention, which he’s trying to replicate every day.”
It’s interesting to note that Mangan and co are conjuring up back stories to
explain the factory settings of their characters. They are certain to have
spent more time on this than Ayckbourn did – aged 30, he miraculously dashed
off the three plays in asin-gle week. The production was sun-nily directed
by Eric Thompson, fondly remembered for voicing TheMagic Roundabout and for
his daughter Emma. His nose for comic talent was evidently sharp, because he
cast Wilton as Norman’s myopic wife, Ruth, without auditioning her. “He was
the least dictatorial person I’ve ever worked with,” she recalls. “I don’t
think people realised quite how much Eric has to do with the success of it,”
Kendal adds. “He didn’t want anybody being funny at all. He wanted everyone
to be entirely real. That may sound obvious, but actually it isn’t.”
The reality did not extend to mining the characters’ inner turmoil. In 1974,
they played Ayckbourn with no foreknowledge of his ever-darkening
world-view. “We thought it was in a wonderful world,” Gambon says. “I never
thought of it being a dark play, and I don’t know how Alan could make it a
dark play.” Yet Ayckbourn subsequently claimed that, if he’d written it
later, the trilogy would have been much bleaker. “I think it’s quite sad
enough,” Miles says. “Any more tragedy, and Tom would end up swinging from a
flex.” Mangan ascribes Norman’s chaotic adrenaline surges to “a pit of
despair and abject misery, which he’s working like fury to cover up. It
certainly isn’t The Good Life on stage”.
So are there going to be any actual laughs in The Norman Conquests this time
round? In God of Carnage and Boeing-Boeing, two recent West End outings,
Warchus has expertly mined the middle classes for laughs. Staying faithful
to the early1970s time period – with no mobiles, and The Joy of Sex recently
published – will no doubt help. And the original cast can attest to a sort
of cumulative intoxication that comes with seeing the trilogy in one go.
“There was a wonderful day near the end of the run at Greenwich when we did
all three on the same day,” Wilton recalls. “By the time it came to the last
one, the more in the know you were, the funnier it was.” It was on such a
day, it seems, that a male audience member rolled in the aisle.
The Norman Conquests is previewing at the Old Vic, SE1, and runs to Dec 20
