With characters and situations drawn just this side of reality, most Alan Ayckbourn plays demand delicately balanced performances that rise above the ordinariness of everyday life but avoid teetering into the realm of the absurd. With this experienced company of actors, Table Manners gets exactly that, in a show in which every line rings true and which keeps the chuckles rolling from beginning to end.
This wonder of a playwright has his 90th play due to open in Scarborough the day after I am writing this, and if the old warhorse is not quite the dominant figure he once was, this glorious production, which never puts a foot wrong, is a reminder of how for decades he provided the backbone that helped sustain British regional theatre as the envy of the world.
Table Manners is the first of the Norman Conquests trilogy, one of his greatest creations, all involving the same six personalities in different rooms of the same house over the same weekend, here the dining room during a succession of lettuce-based frugal dinners and breakfasts.
Norman is already the conquerer, winning the hearts of Annie and her sister-in-law Sarah, with a zest for life that cuts through their mundane relationships. Ross Waiton, in pyjamas and pompom hat, is the tummy-scratching Norman, gigolo and assistant librarian, first heard singing merrily and shocking the company by confessing to an aborted dirty weekend with Annie, who "could have had these pyjamas and all they contain."
The dialogue zings, as three unhappy relationships disintegrate, with serious confessions interpolated with inane requests or questions. Lonely Annie, a winsomely appealing Lucy-Jane Quinlan, confesses to a shocked Sarah having had sex on the rug with Norman. "Which rug?" the latter asks.
It’s typical of Joanna Simpkins’s Sarah, bossy, sanctimonious and just a little titillated, as she is fed up with ironic, wise-cracking husband Reg, played with nonchalant resignation by Pete Ashmore.
Toby Manley is the self-effacing Tom, failing at every turn to respond to Annie’s come-and-get-me signals, threatening at one point to use his boxing training on a recalcitrant Norman, "although I wasn’t very good at it," and who all but disappears at dinner by having to sit on a child’s seat, from which a permission-to-speak sort of hand rises only timidly.
One never loses sympathy with any of the characters, despite or because of their weaknesses, not least with Polly Smith’s Ruth, to whom falls one of the play’s most telling lines, that she feels husband Norman does not really belong to her but is like a library book and might be recalled at any time.
Upstairs, away from the family mayhem, is Annie, Ruth and Reg's mother, who never appears here or in any of the plays of the trilogy. What a shame. She is missing a treat.
Others can still enjoy it, however, when the production transfers to Harrogate and Ipswich.