Play Reading in English – Round and Round the Garden by Alan Ayckbourn

HK English Speaking Union
  • Mon 15-02-2016 7:15 PM - 2 h

Colette Artbar

Free Admission

Synopsis

 

This month’s play-reading is Alan Ayckbourn’s farcical domestic comedy, Round and Round the Garden taken from his popular trilogy, The Norman Conquests, a trio of comic plays written in 1973 and adapted for television. There are only six characters, namely Norman, his wife Ruth, her brother Reg and his wife Sarah, Ruth's sister Annie, and Tom, Annie's next-door-neighbour. The plays are at times wildly comic and at times poignant in their portrayals of the relationships among the six characters. Each of the plays depicts the same six characters over the same weekend in a different part of a house. Table Manners is set in the dining room, Living Together in the living room, and Round and Round the Garden in the garden, not surprisingly.

 

Each play is self-contained, and they may be watched in any order. Some of the scenes overlap, and on several occasions a character's exit from one play corresponds with an entrance in another. The story centres on an extended family of two sisters and an older brother and their significant (or insignificant!) others.  Annie, the youngest of the three, still lives at home tending to an elderly, bedridden mother we never see. The action begins when Sarah and Reg (Annie's older brother) arrive to give Annie the chance to escape for the weekend for a long-needed rest. Fireworks begin almost immediately when Annie tells Sarah she is going away with her sister's husband, Norman. That pretty much sets the tone for the evening: an extended family whose members simultaneously despise each other and can't get enough of each other. The central figure is Norman, who needs desperately to be needed - by anyone. It's almost hard to blame him, too, once you meet his wife, Ruth, a career-obsessed woman with little apparent need for Norman. In Table Manners the farcical ‘dirty weekend’ in which the whole family meets up unexpectedly at Annie’s house, Norman’s plans to seduce Annie are foiled. In Round and Round the Garden Norman shows up at the garden of the house, hiding in the bushes, and before he can signal to Annie to leave, he is spotted and has to pretend he's come to visit. Tom pops round for food, and Norman's wife, the cool and tough Ruth, comes to visit their querulous Mother.  In the garden, Norman tries to spirit Annie away once more, while Reg and Tom speculate on who Norman has now as his "bit on the side," and Ruth sunbathes. Will peace ever return to the garden? There was a very successful revival of the trilogy at London's Old Vic Theatre in 2008 followed by a Broadway production in 2009. Below is the TV adaptation link on YouTube for those who want to familiarise themselves with the play before we meet. All are welcome.

 

Facilitators: Mike Ingham & Julian Quail 

Photo credit:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31J8G-qwOnL._SX309_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


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