Soulpepper's Fiona Reid and Ted Dykstra take a break from rehearsal for The Norman Conquests at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail
When you've just staged a triumphant revival of Tony Kushner's two-play, six-hour Angels in America, what do you do for an encore? For the indefatigable Soulpepper Theatre, the answer is: Mount Alan Ayckbourn's three-play, six-hour The Norman Conquests.
While not as ambitious in scope or as intellectual in content as Angels, Ayckbourn's 1973 comic trilogy is still, in director Ted Dykstra's words, "an astounding achievement." It's both a marvel of sustained hilarity and a remarkable feat of theatrical engineering.
The plays, which began performances on Sept. 27, tell the same tale of a disastrous weekend at an English country house from three different locations. The first one, Table Manners, is set in the house's dining room; the second, Living Together, shows us what takes place in the sitting room; as for Round and Round the Garden, well, you get the picture.
Like a puzzle, all three pieces fit together to give a full picture of events; but Ayckbourn has also written them so that each play can be enjoyed independently without any knowledge of the others. Soulpepper is presenting them, like Angels, both separately and as a six-hour marathon.
Taking a break from rehearsals in the tiny library of the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, Dykstra remembers his reaction when Albert Schultz, Soulpepper's artistic honcho, approached him to helm the whole project.
"I was, Whoa, three full-length plays? And with the same six actors, and not quite enough rehearsal time? But Fiona e-mailed me that same day and said 'I want to do this.' I was thrilled."
Fiona is Fiona Reid, one of Canada's finest comic actors – as she reminded us again this summer with her sublime performance in Soulpepper's Entertaining Mr. Sloane.
In other words, just the sort of top-drawer talent you want in your corner if you're going to do epic-length Ayckbourn.
Reid saw The Norman Conquests during its original London run in the mid-Seventies and was eager to be part of this rare revival. "This play is so wonderfully true about people, and family dysfunction and marital dysfunction," she says from the other end of the library table. "It really deserves to be seen."
She joins what Dykstra calls his "thoroughbred" cast, which also includes Derek Boyes, Laura Condlln, Oliver Dennis, Sarah Mennell and Schultz himself as the shaggy, libidinous Norman.
Reid plays control-freak Sarah, who has arrived at the house with her feckless husband Reg (Boyes) to relieve his sister, Annie (Condlln), the caregiver for their elderly mother. Annie has secretly planned to escape for a "dirty weekend" with Norman, her brother-in-law. But that plan quickly collapses and soon the family, including Norman and his wife Ruth (Mennell), along with Annie's dithering would-be fiancé Tom (Dennis), are stuck spending a miserable time together. Dreadful makeshift meals are eaten, too much homemade wine is imbibed, and all sorts of ugly feelings bubble to the surface like scum.
It's a domestic horror story structured like a farce and enriched by Ayckbourn's keen insight into human behaviour. The word often used to describe the trilogy is Chekhovian. Or, as The New York Times's Ben Brantley has felicitously put it, in his review of the Old Vic's Tony Award-winning 2009 revival, it's "Chekhov pumped full of nitrous oxide."
British critics have been heaping such praise on Ayckbourn for decades, yet oddly enough, his incisive and ingenious comedies have seldom been produced in Toronto. It's surprising to learn that the U.K.-born Reid, seemingly a perfect choice to embody Ayckbourn's brittle middle-class characters, has never done any of his plays. Dykstra, no mean comic actor himself, has appeared in just one: Soulpepper's 2002 production of A Chorus of Disapproval.
"I think there's a bit of contempt in Canada for really good comedy writers," Dykstra muses. "I think we suspect comedy because when it's done well it looks effortless, and we like to see effort – we want to see somebody workin' hard."
Reid, however, can attest that there's plenty of hard work in performing three interconnected plays that sometimes have similar, but subtly different, dialogue. "You have to ask your brain to expand," she says. "It's really asking the synapses to work in a different way than they usually work."
All the same, she admits the role of Sarah has come a little too easily to her. "I'm so ashamed to say it, but there's definitely a side of my character that resembles Sarah. She's a complete pain in the behind and it's been no effort at all to play her," she says, laughing.
Adds Dykstra: "What I love about Fiona's performance is how much she delights in that character. She brings this joy of performing to this person that, in real life, would drive us all round the bend."
One aspect of Sarah sure to rankle modern audiences is her pre-feminist attitude. In the course of the plays, she shows pity and contempt for her sister-in-law Ruth, who has chosen to be a childless career woman. It's one reminder that these comedies belong to a bygone era – although in 1973, Ayckbourn was already astutely critiquing Seventies attitudes.
Dykstra says the seemingly lighthearted premise of The Norman Conquests, in which a man has an affair with his wife's sister, is redolent of the sexual revolution. "Back then the idea of free love was so new and fresh that it had an innocence to it. People thought, 'Hey, we can do this now.' But we've learned since then that, actually, you can't. It doesn't work out. And I think Ayckbourn knew that. His inkling was that being happy has nothing to do with who you're having sex with, when you're having sex, or how often. But for a brief little window in time people thought it might bring them happiness."
The Norman Conquests runs Sept. 27 to Nov. 16 in the Michael Young Theatre at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.