The Norman Conquests - Table Manners

Alan Ayckbourn's classic trio of interconnecting plays, seen from hilariously differing perspectives, is performed by one ensemble of actors. Each play can be enjoyed as a single performance or seen as one event in any sequence, either over different days or on trilogy days.

An English country house. A summer weekend. A family gathering.

Norman would like to seduce Annie, though he’s married to her sister, Ruth. He’s also got his eye on Sarah, though she’s married to Reg – who is Annie and Ruth’s brother. Tom, from next door, isn’t married to anyone: though he too nurses secret hopes beneath his stoical surface.

With pungent wit and sparkling ingenuity, Alan Ayckbourn fashions the thwarted desires and bittersweet absurdity of family life into a comic masterpiece.

Table Manners
Saturday. 6pm. The dining room. Where no-one is looking forward to Annie’s limp salad, or her mother’s lethal home-made dandelion, parsnip or carrot wine.

Living Together
Saturday. 6.30pm. The sitting room. With a wind-up gramophone, a pouffe, magazines, and a very, very inviting fur rug.

Round and Round the Garden
Saturday. 5.30pm. The garden. It’s not the only thing that’s looking wild and very, very tangled.

Alan Ayckbourn is Britain’s most prolific and popular contemporary playwright with over eighty plays to his name. Recent productions at Chichester include Way Upstream, Absurd Person Singular and Surprises.