Lover Takes All

By Gina Mallet

THE NORMAN CONQUESTS

by ALAN AYCKBOURN

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.

Ostensibly, he is an assistant librarian; actually, his entire life is spent in pursuit of love. He may be threadbare, even unprepossessing, but his willingness to adapt himself to any woman's whims and moods makes him irresistible. He will stop at nothing to get his way, and he never stops. "Life with Norman," says his wife Ruth with bitter understatement, "is full of unexpected eye movements."

On this particular summer weekend Norman arrives to feed his ravenous libido at the country house of his sister-in-law, gentle Annie. He also wreaks havoc on his relations. "I'm a three-a-day man," he declares, beating his puny chest. With virtuoso cunning, he almost makes the boast good. Annie, then his angry wife, and even stuck-up Sarah (another sister-in-law), fall into his arms.

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 and desolate.

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 is not. Too broad for the English idiom, he appears to have strayed from a road company of Fiddler on the Roof. Eric Thompson directs with the same ordered frenzy he applied to Ayckbourn's hit of last year, Absurd Person Singular, but this time he is hampered by a company that fails to become an ensemble.

Luckily, there are a couple of generous compensations. Carole Shelley is so stingingly sarcastic as Ruth that the scenery shrivels. As Sarah, the super-housewife, Estelle Parsons yaps through the trilogy like an angry Peke. Funny is as useless a word to describe them as high is for Everest.

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