playing in the garden – in the dining room – in the living room

by Alan Ayckbourn

director Eleonora d’Urso

 

with Elisabetta Becattini - Ruth, Daria D’Aloia - Annie, Simone Francia - Reg, Valeria Perdonò - Sara, Giuseppe Pestillo - Norman, Giovanni Prosperi – Tom

 

lighting design Raffaele Perin
assistant to director Giulia Santilli

drawings Alessandro Rak

production HurlyBurly 

with the support of La Corte Ospitale

 

A delightful country house near London. A weekend in July 1973. A sick mother and a cat that will never see each other. A romantic getaway that will go wrong. Very strong wine. A board game where  nothing is  realistic. Salad for lunch and for dinner. Three couples, for a total of six characters, constantly at war with each other and set one against the another by a catastrophic Norman, a gigolo who looks more like a scarecrow.
These are  all the ingredients that summarize the trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn, The Norman conquests, an overwhelming  three-part comedy that tells the story of three couples who find themselves spending a weekend in the countryside and within the living room, garden and dining room, are forced, against their will, to deal with the disasters caused by the advances that Norman makes towards all the women present. A peaceful summer weekend is turned into an authentic  civil war that continues, nonstop, until Monday morning, and that is fought in lashes of envy, spite, teasing, stolen kisses, crumpled beds, relentless doubts, bad punches, cookies launched, soupy stews, unbearable jokes and carpets entangled around  someone who will make an unusual use of this carpet.
Three comedies and the same comedy.
Three interchangeable shows - "In the garden," "In the dining room" and "In the living room" - which can be seen in any order wanted and to the extent wanted, without compromising the comprehension or comic potential; not at all. The spectator hungry for entertainment can decide which and how many of the three plays to see, in a crescendo of comedy that will go hand in hand with his curiosity.
The ending is a surprise, and it will be up to the spectator to understand if there are three endings, one for each comedy, or else just one.
The entertainment is guaranteed!

Tickets:
Unreserved Seat €15

***

The choice of bringing the trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn, The Norman conquests to the 53rd Festival of 2 Worlds arises, quite simply, from my very personal love, first for the text and then for the extraordinary comic  potential of the staging just as Ayckbourn had designed it, namely: the same hilarious comedy set in three different areas of the same house, "In the dining room," "In the living room" and "In the garden".
In 2008, I was lucky enough to see the entire trilogy performed at the Old Vic in London, thanks to an enterprising Kevin Spacey, who had done everything possible to have the trilogy on the bill again after an absence of thirty-four years from the London scene.
I was part of that crowd of people who made the show a sell out for four months. An ever growing number of spectators would come into the theatre with a precise objective: to have fun!  Credit goes to Alan Ayckbourn’s pen, undisputed master of English comedy.
As a child, whenever I went to the theater, I asked myself, without answering, where the characters went when they left the stage, and if, for example, some of them were told: “Go into the living room! I imagined that behind the scenes there was a real house, hidden from my view  and made up of rooms which I would have never seen. If then, during the show, that same character came back on stage from that imaginary invisible living room, I would tell myself that something had certainly happened in that living room, something terribly tragic or terribly comical, and I didn’t think it was right that I was prevented from watching. 
Right from here, perhaps, is where Alan Ayckbourn started, from the eyes of a child, from his curious eyes as a spectator, and he decided to tell, as only he can, the same story, the same overwhelming comedy  of  love,  intrigues,  passions,  conquests,  quarrels,  misunderstandings,  outbursts,  betrayals,
weaknesses, envy, spite…but divided into three parts, that is, in three different places of the same  house.
The time frame is the same for all three plays, in fact everything happens between a Saturday morning and the following Monday morning, the three couples of characters are also the same with the same plot of love, yet the comedy doubles or  triples, according to the plays that the viewer chooses to watch.
The dramatic force of the trilogy, the idea that made The Norman Conquests a success, is that each individual comedy embodies the whole story and the viewer who  witnesses even only  one of the three will still laugh, enjoying a show that is entertaining and full of surprises. At the same time, the  viewer who is curious and eager for fun that, after watching “In the dining room” decides to also see “In the living room” or “In the garden” or both – in any order  - will instead discover what I as a child was not able to, which is what happened in the other rooms of the house when the characters went offstage.
Ayckbourn’s intuition to  allow the viewer to have both a global and a unique vision, is simple yet effective,  as it adds comedy to comedy, in a crescendo which leaves you breathless.
I invite the viewer to let himself go to the confusion by attending the three different shows and to discover, along  the way, that  the show is incredibly always the same but seen from an increasingly hilarious angle.
Eleonora D’Urso