Ayckbourn's "The Norman Conquests' on Broadway

Alan Ayckbourn's very British 1973 trilogy, The Norman Conquests, is still funny after all these years. The new and very polished Old Vic production, transferred from London to New York, is entertaining and intriguing, an improbably moving farce. But it's not quite as hilarious or as touching or as Chekhovian as many of its recent rave reviews insist it is.

The three plays all concern the same characters and the same weekend; each play can stand alone, but the running gags and the cumulative effect make seeing all three in order the way to do it if you do it. The gimmick is that each play reveals what was happening elsewhere or just before or just after the scene we're watching. In Table Manners, Act I, Scene I takes place on Saturday at 6 p.m., but we won't find out what happened on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. until Act I, Scene I of the third play, Round and Round the Garden. Needless to say, the audience spends a good deal of each intermission trying to puzzle out what's what.

So, ready to lay down nearly eight hours (not including breaks for meals), I signed on for the marathon.

Bunker mentality in the audience

How odd to hear the usher say, "Good morning" as she hands me the playbill. Play #1, Table Manners, begins at 11:30 a.m. followed by Living Together at 3:30. By the end of play #3, Round and Round the Garden, at 10:15 p.m., everyone in the audience has grown accustomed to seeing each other, and we chat with a sort of bunker mentality— a privileged bunker, to be sure.

As for the plays: Somewhere in rural England, in an old, dilapidated house, lies a mother— sick, difficult and self-confined to bed. So now we know we're not going to meet her, since the plays take place in the dining room, then the sitting room, then the garden of an old Victorian house. Her daughter Annie (Jessica Hynes) is her sole, put-upon caretaker, whose neighbor is Tom (Ben Miles), a vet who's too shy and "ponderous" to pursue their relationship. Hynes is lovely but unkempt, with real English rose looks, and she has developed an anthology of self-conscious gestures and a slouching, loping walk to convey Annie's awkwardness.

An endearing mess

Reg (Paul Ritter) is Annie's brother, and Ruth (Amelia Bullmore) is their sister— slim, striking and successful. Browbeaten Reg arrives with his tense, judgmental wife Sarah (Amanda Root), presumably to let Annie get away for a weekend. When Sarah discovers that Annie's dirty weekend away is to be spent with Ruth's husband, Norman (Stephen Mangan)— the conqueror of the trilogy's title— family mayhem ensues.

Mangan's Norman is an endearing mess—an eccentric assistant librarian with an uncombed mop of curls and an enormous appetite for sex and joy, "a gigolo trapped in a haystack." He will conquer and re-conquer and un-conquer nearly everybody. The question on which the production inevitably rests is: Will he conquer us?

Table Manners had me laughing for nearly all of its two-plus hours. Living Together, too, made me laugh (Reg's imitation of the moves of chess pieces is fall-off-your-chair funny, as is Tom's staggeringly boring, hilarious monologue about a camping trip spent "watching for badgers."). But as the quarrels escalate to brawls, we discover layers beneath the farce; there is a weird and moving realism beneath the ridiculous surface— these people are unhappy and needy and lonely and trapped; as Ruth says, "other people's marriages are invariably a source of amazement."

A cheaper sort of fun

Unfortunately, the final play, Round and Round the Garden, is too full of back-story and set pieces and seems to go for far more commercial, easy-access sit-com laughs. All the thorny personalities we'd come to feel such sympathy and affection for, now seem much less likable and much more irritating. This play is fun, but a cheaper fun, making us wonder whether all this time was well spent.

Finally, the gimmick of writing a conventional family comedy and then chopping it up into pieces and arranging those pieces to create three separate plays is clever and amusing but, maybe, just a gimmick. Marathons must be more than the sum of their parts, not less (remember the thrill of seeing Angels in America with only a dinner break? Remember the astonishing heft of it at the end?) The Norman Conquests lacks heft, and although the actors are superb, we go home a day less and many dollars short.