Menage a Six

By Frank Rich

THE NORMAN CONQUESTS

PBS, June 14, 21 and 28

Three years ago British Playwright Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests came to Broadway and failed to conquer. Though a huge critical and commercial hit in London, this comic trilogy barely limped through a six-month New York City run. It was not difficult to figure out what had gone wrong: unlike such other recent imports as Peter Shaffer's Equus and Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged, The Norman Conquests had been given an indifferent production. Miscast American actors clobbered the wit out of Ayckbourn's words. Now, through PBS's Great Performances series, The Norman Conquests has a second chance to make good in the U.S.--and this time it surely will. In its TV incarnation (produced in England), The Norman Conquests is not only funny but impossibly wise about sex, marriage, love and loneliness.

In the characteristic Ayckbourn manner, the trilogy is built around an ingenious gimmick. Each of the plays tells of the same six characters in the same country house during the same long weekend; indeed, all three plays take place concurrently and tell the exact same story. What makes each one different is its vantage point. The first play, Table Manners, unfolds in the house's dining room; the second, Living Together, is set in the living room; the third takes the characters Round and Round the Garden. Though each play can stand on its own, the trilogy forms an enormous jigsaw puzzle: every time a character leaves the room to go somewhere else in the house, his exit becomes an entrance in one of the other plays. Through Ayckbourn's Rashomon-like device, the audience feels that it learns the whole truth about the people onstage.

Those people are a trio of British middle-class couples, all related, who are brought together by happenstance for 48 hours of squabbling, eating, drinking and fondling. The action is ignited by the only live wire in the group, an assistant librarian named Norman. Though in most ways ordinary, Norman believes it is his mission in life to make women happy by showering them with love. Employing his considerable resources of charm and empathy, he tries to seduce both his dreary sisters-in-law -- even as he maintains his relationship with his wife.

Farcical misadventures follow, but what makes The Norman Conquests memorable is not Ayckbourn's cleverness so much as his compassion. As Norman's strategies start to fail, the consequences seem almost tragic. We realize that Ayckbourn's characters can never fulfill even their modest dreams of adventure and romance; they are doomed by circumstance and social convention to a defeated middle age. Perhaps the fate of the six is foreshadowed by Ayckbourn's seventh and unseen character: a family matriarch who never leaves her bedroom because she "just has no desire to get up."

Director Herbert Wise (I, Claudius) is keenly sensitive to the nuances of the writing; there isn't a broad moment in the entire 5 1/2 hours. The cast could not be better. Richard Briers is particularly dexterous as a foolish, henpecked husband whose chummy manner does not entirely hide a disappointed heart. So is Penelope Wilton as the spinsterish sister who is most touchingly desperate for affection.

The title role belongs to Tom Conti, last seen in the BBC's Glittering Prizes. An enthusiastic purveyor of false hopes, Conti manages to be valiant and cruel at the same time. His fanatically exasperating Norman is the perfect comic catalyst for Ayckbourn's searing portrait of frustrated lives.

Frank Rich

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