Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since geographical distances are nominal, Britain gains from cross-fertilization between the bustling regional theaters and the London scene. Trevor Griffiths' Comedians originated at the Nottingham Playhouse. All of Alan Ayckbourn's recent plays, including Absent Friends, were initially presented at the Library Theater in Scarborough (Yorkshire), where Ayckbourn is director of productions. The underlying significance of the two leading repertory companies, the National Theater (TIME, March 15) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, is not simply that they exist and command ample subsidies but that they represent touchstones by which all members of the English theatrical community...
...NORMAN CONQUESTS. Love is never saying no, according to Alan Ayckbourn's comic monster Norman, whose ravenous libido reduces not one but three evenings to a riotous shambles of reluctant yes-women...
Truly comic characters appear onstage about as often as there is a lunar eclipse. That is what makes the arrival of Norman, the pint-sized anarchist of Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy, an occasion of happy terror. The most satisfying laughs are those induced by determined worms, and Norman is an Attila of the worm world...
Norman has a lot of cheek. So does Ayckbourn. He offers three views of the hectic 48 hours-in three different plays, which must be seen on different nights. The first, Table Manners, is about what happens in the dining room when it is not happening on the family hearth rug in No. 2, Living Together, or in the bushes in No. 3, Round and Round the Garden. Do not be alarmed. It is nothing like the Ring. The comedies interweave with the boisterous precision of a Scottish reel, and finally yield a picture of family life at once riotous...
Gumbooted Bears. Ayckbourn is one of England's funniest, most prolific playwrights, with a fine ear for middle-class patterns of speech. Sometimes his dialogue snaps back like Noel Coward's; at others, he evokes P.G. Wodehouse's rococo style. It is a shame that this production fails to do him or Norman justice. A man who envisions Australia in winter as an army of gumbooted koala bears and who can find menace in his pajamas ("The tops are alright-it's the bottoms you've got to watch") must be lovable. Richard Benjamin...