ESTP Presents Alan Ayckbourn's THE NORMAN CONQUESTS

It is with a significant amount of comic satisfaction that ESTP presents a special event, on Saturday and Sunday, September 17 and 18. An intimate epic.

A weekend at mother's house makes for sidesplitting comedy in Sir Alan Ayckbourn's 1973 brilliant triptych, The Norman Conquests. Youngest sister Annie's been caring for mother; brother Reg and his wife Sarah arrive to spell Annie whilst she takes a rare weekend off, but it soon comes out Annie's weekend is not to be spent with her sort-of-a-boyfriend Tom, but with her sister Ruth's husband Norman...

Ayckbourn wrote a book called The Crafty Art of Playmaking, and this masterwork is like a lesson in that art. Each of the plays of the trilogy shows how the events of the weekend unfold in a different part of the house: dining room, living room, and garden. Motivations and actions in one place inform behavior in the others. All six characters are vivid and desperately funny, but the flame under which the other five begin to burn is started by Norman Dewars, an assistant librarian who has within him a passion that can neither be completely understood nor contained. His desire for connection, if it were just sexual, would at least be comprehensible to the family into which he has married.

But there's more to love than making love, and there's more to Norman too: Norman loves. What infuriates and fascinates his in-laws is that his inextinguishable desires ignite them as well - forcing them to ask if the delicate, unspoken agreements they've negotiated with each other are enough. And so, after a good deal of hilarious shenanigans, all three couples end the weekend rather differently than they began it.

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