The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn

First published: 1975

First produced: 1973, at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, England

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: England

Principal Characters:

• Norman Dewers, a librarian
• Ruth Dewers, his wife, a businesswoman
• Reg, Ruth’s brother, a real estate agent
• Sarah, Reg’s wife
• Annie, Ruth and Reg’s younger sister
• Tom, Annie’s friend, a veterinarian

The Play

The Norman Conquests is a trilogy of full-length plays, Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden, each taking place during the same July weekend in different parts of a house and garden in suburban England. Table Manners, set in the dining room, opens on a Saturday evening as Reg and Sarah arrive to look after Reg’s invalid mother while Annie, his youngest sister, goes away for the weekend. Annie is going alone, leaving behind her friend Tom, a veterinarian who prefers animals to people and is, according to Sarah, “a trifle ponderous.” Tom has never touched Annie, who believes that he visits only when he has nothing to do.

Annie reveals that she is leaving with her sister Ruth’s husband, Norman, with whom she had sexual relations the previous Christmas, but prudish Sarah vows to stop them. Reg, on the other hand, is happy that his sister is finally going to have some romance in her life. The naïve Tom appears and says that he would have gone with Annie if she had asked. Even though Norman is in the garden waiting for her, Annie decides not to go.

Scene 2 of act 1 occurs the following morning, as Norman tries to convince Annie that he only wants to make her happy. Then Ruth appears, having been summoned by Sarah. Ruth and Norman argue about their marriage, with Ruth claiming that he has held her career back ten years. Norman discloses his adulterous plans with Annie, and Ruth laughs when he claims that they are in love.

Act 2, scene 1, takes place that evening, with Tom threatening to punch Norman for upsetting Annie. Norman attempts to enlist Sarah’s support by explaining how they are both sensitive. Ruth tells Annie that Tom loves her but needs to be coerced into action. Annie apologizes to her sister for her would-be romance with Norman. Over dinner, Norman and Ruth squabble, and dim Tom, thinking that Norman is insulting Annie, strikes him. Norman and Sarah unite in feeling misunderstood. In act 2, scene 2, the following morning, Norman suggests that Sarah needs a holiday and volunteers to go with her, promising to make her happy. She invites him to call her later. Annie tells Tom that she agreed to leave with Norman only because she was lonely, but he, as usual, fails to get the point. The play ends with Annie asking Norman to take her away.

Living Together is set in the sitting room and opens on the same Saturday evening as the previous play. Norman tries to explain to Sarah how innocent his weekend with Annie would have been, how no one would have been hurt if Annie had not told her about it. Annie tells Norman that she is fond of Tom but that communicating with the veterinarian “is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates.” Norman continues attempting to seduce Annie, and Reg catches them kissing. Tom realizes that “something seems to be going on which I’m not being let into.” Norman takes out some of his frustrations by advising Tom to win Annie’s affection through treating her roughly. Norman begins drinking wine made by Annie’s mother before she became confined to her bed, gradually becomes very drunk, and passes out on the rug on which he and Annie made love. Reg persuades the others, in act 1, scene 2, to play a complicated board game he has invented, trying to instruct them while the drunken Norman talks to Ruth on the telephone and shouts at his mother-in-law on the extension. Becoming assertive, Tom tells Annie, “You’re damned lucky to have me around,” and threatens to slug her. The act ends in total confusion.

Act 2, scene 1, opens the following morning, with Ruth complaining of Norman’s wasting her time: “I almost wish to heavens he’d gone away with Annie, had his weekend and got it over with.” She also complains of never getting along with the “evil woman upstairs,” referring to her mother’s many adulteries while her children were growing up. Sarah finds Annie and Norman kissing and tells her, “You’re just a tart like your Mother.” Norman enjoys watching Annie and Sarah almost come to blows. Finally exasperated, Ruth slaps Norman. He accuses her of being less upset by his infidelity than by his effect on her work. He claims to have arranged the weekend with Annie simply to gain Ruth’s attention and seduces his wife on the rug. The next morning, in act 2, scene 2, Ruth is embarrassed when Reg finds them asleep there. Tom is also ashamed of his behavior toward Annie. The play ends with Sarah saying she wants to go to Bournemouth alone and Reg shocked at the implications.

Round and Round the Garden begins slightly earlier and closes a bit later than the other two plays. Tom, who uses the old lady’s cat as an excuse to visit Annie, is in the garden trying to coax it out of a tree so he can examine its paw. Though they were to meet in the nearby village, Norman arrives because he is afraid that Annie has changed her mind about their holiday together. They are going to unfashionable East Grinstead, he explains, since he was unable to book Hastings. He tries to hide before Tom can see him. Reg shows up thinking Annie is going off with Tom and jokes with Norman about the “bit of stuff” he is to meet in East Grinstead, but Sarah comes outside to announce that Annie is not going anywhere. Act 1, scene 2, takes place that night as the drunken Norman flirts with Sarah. He induces her to lose control, and they kiss. Having decided that she is a coward for not following through on her plan, Annie invites Norman to her room. Insisting that women manipulate and dominate men, Norman wants Reg and Tom to take a holiday with him. Annie and Sarah find him professing his affection for Reg and crying that no one loves him.

Act 2, scene 1, occurs late the next morning. Ruth tells Sarah that she cannot take Norman seriously; he is annoying, but she does not want to be rid of him. Sarah denies that Norman has made advances to her. When Ruth tries to encourage Tom to express his emotions, he misunderstands and thinks that she is in love with him. In front of them all, Norman and Annie embrace passionately, so Tom grabs Ruth and kisses her. In the play’s final scene, the visitors begin leaving, but Ruth’s car will not start. Reg and Ruth wonder whether their mates are becoming involved with each other, but Norman swears he would never consider such an affair. Haltingly, Tom finally proposes, but Annie wants to go away and think about it. While Reg tows his sister’s car, Norman rams into his, disabling both. The play ends with Norman telling all three women that he can make them happy, as each walks away from him.

Dramatic Devices

The three plays that compose The Norman Conquests are meant to stand on their own and be seen in any order. With this approach, Alan Ayckbourn achieves considerable irony and humor, especially when his audience is seeing its third play and knows what is going on offstage. Tom’s effort, in Living Together, to describe the argument going on in the dining room between Reg and Sarah is more amusing for those who have already experienced this scene. After Reg catches Annie and Norman kissing in the first play and Sarah does the same in the second, it is hilarious in the third to find all the others staring, amazed, at the passionate couple. Ayckbourn also seems to be using this device to comment on the nature of truth. The audience for one part of the trilogy thinks that it fully understands the characters and their predicaments, but each play fills in details needed for full comprehension. (The playwright may be satirizing the theatrical convention of relying on offstage events to move the action forward.)

The plays are best seen or read in the order Ayckbourn presents them in the published version. When Norman’s entrance is delayed until the second scene of Table Manners, the protagonist begins to take on almost mythic proportions and is clearly the catalyst for all the action of the trilogy. Since Table Manners ends with Annie clinging to Norman and Living Together with Sarah considering going to Bournemouth with him, Round and Round the Garden should be seen last: As all three women walk out on Norman, Ayckbourn suggests that the modern age has turned its back on the romantic.

Ayckbourn uses only occasional visual humor lest the play become farce. Ruth’s refusal to wear her glasses, resulting in her pouring hot water instead of milk on her cereal, reveals her vanity and stubbornness. Because she cannot see well enough, she is unable to open a collapsible garden chair all the way and, placing it on its side, sits on it anyway. Tom arrives and arranges his chair similarly, showing his courtesy, conformity, timidity, and general eccentricity.

More typical of Ayckbourn’s humor is the use of two unseen characters, the invalid mother upstairs and her treed cat, as silent commentators hovering, like ironic gods, above the fray. Mother’s needs and whims must be attended to regardless of the turmoil downstairs. Though Ayckbourn’s style of comedy depends primarily on character and situation, it is frequently verbal as well. Ruth tells Norman that when Sarah telephoned her “she sounded as if she was summoning relatives to your bedside,” and he replies, “I suppose she was, in a manner of speaking.” Of his wife, Reg says, “She’s like those toy animals you see in the back windows of cars. Any violent movement from me and she’s nodding her head reproachfully for days.”

Critical Context

Alan Ayckbourn writes what seem to be conventional comedies but creates unusual staging techniques for many of them. In How the Other Half Loves (pr. 1969, pb. 1972), two sets are superimposed to create the illusion that actions occurring at different times and places are happening simultaneously. The characters in Bedroom Farce (pr. 1975, pb. 1977) crisscross among three bedrooms in three houses. Taking Steps (pr. 1979, pb. 1981) is set on multiple levels of a house, and Way Upstream (pr. 1981, pb. 1983) takes place on a boat floating in a fiberglass tank of water. For Sisterly Feelings (pr. 1979, pb. 1981), Ayckbourn wrote two versions of the second and third scenes of a four-scene play and allows the actors to choose which to perform. Most unconventional is Intimate Exchanges (pr. 1982, pb. 1985), in which two performers portray ten characters and whose thirty-one scenes may be presented in sixteen combinations. The Norman Conquests has been called the most effective of these experiments for the mathematical precision with which its various parts dovetail. “House” and “Garden” (pr., pb. 2000) were two productions played in adjacent theaters, performed at the same time, and employing the same characters, who move back and forth between the two theaters during the course of the same evening’s performance. Doubtless The Norman Conquests, using a similar concept, sparked the idea of simultaneous performances.

The relatively sober ending to Round and Round the Garden is appropriate. Ayckbourn’s subsequent comedies have grown increasingly dark as the playwright strives to find the comic side of the alienation, frustration, and even tragedy of modern life. Although Ayckbourn has been criticized for being repetitive and too absorbed in middle-class mores, he has, for a highly successful commercial playwright, shown remarkable growth, as with his increasingly complex and sympathetic female characters, and an enthusiastic willingness to experiment.

Sources for Further Study

Billington, Michael. Alan Ayckbourn. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Blisten, Elmer M. “Alan Ayckbourn: A Few Jokes, Much Comedy.” Modern Drama 26 (March, 1983): 26-35.

Dukore, Bernard F. Alan Ayckbourn: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1991.

Hayman, Ronald. “Innovation and Conservatism.” In British Theatre Since 1955: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Howarth, W. D. “English Humor and French Comique? The Class of Anouilh and Ayckbourn.” New Comparison 3 (Summer, 1987): 72-82.

Kerensky, Oleg. “Alan Ayckbourn.” In The New British Drama: Fourteen Playwrights Since Osborne and Pinter. London: Hamilton, 1977.

Taylor, John Russell. “Art and Commerce: The New Drama in the West End Marketplace.” In Contemporary English Drama, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. London: E. Arnold, 1981.

Watson, Ian. Conversations with Ayckbourn. 1981. Rev. ed. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988.