Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alan Ayckbourn...
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...
...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...
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...
...Ayckbourn can spot the shifting pressures of money and status with a barometric eye. His ear has perfect pitch for the recycled banalities that pass for conversation and the kind of gossip that stirs marital tempests in provincial teapots. Rarely have Ayckbourn's intelligence, nimble comic flair and sympathetic imagination been more acutely on display than in Absent Friends, which gets a rousingly animated U.S. premiere at Washington's Kennedy Center...