In-house review by Colin Smith

Before retirement, Colin Smith was a BBC Radio producer specialising in poetry and drama for schools.
For BBC Worldwide he edited and co-produced Noël Coward - An Autobiography, which was voted Best Production in the Spoken Words Awards 2001.

Table Manners, dating from 1973, is perhaps better known as one part of The Norman Conquests : three related plays capable of being performed simultaneously. The situation common to all three is a family weekend during which Norman, a shiftless librarian, propositions his two sisters-in-law Annie and Sarah, and his wife Ruth. Alan Ayckbourn thus sets himself even more problems of construction than is usual in farce, but acquits himself triumphantly: "We could only afford six characters, only two stage entrances .. and the actor I had to play Norman couldn't join us for the first few days of the season - which necessitated him making a late entrance to facilitate rehearsals". He went on to report "I found myself grappling with the triplet sisters all with very different personalities. Climaxes, comic ones naturally, seemed to abound everywhere. Table Manners was the most robust and, as it proved on stage, the most overtly funny".

However, there's a trap for the unwary. Ayckbourn adds that eighty per cent of the productions he has seen of his plays have always been far too boisterous. "That's the British idea of having a good time". Table Manners calls for six resourceful actors to play themes and variations on the individual and shared grievances, stresses and neuroses of the three couples; and happily the Tower team was well matched - and understated, for added enjoyment. Sarah and Reg, Ruth and Norman, Annie and Tom. Colette Dockery's Sarah, trying to impose order on the domestic chaos in Annie's house, climaxed with her frustrated seating arrangements at the table. She clashed energetically with Reg (Peter Westbury): oblivious to her demands, he projected a kind of superior jokiness and buoyancy. Tom, the vaguest of vets, provokes maddened responses all round, even from usually patient Annie whose own untroubled chaos is the despair of her sisters. Allan Hart as this lost dog also gave the essentially well-meaning strain in his character's make-up; and Jill Fear's Annie was thoroughly rounded out with self-conscious laughs and gauche body language.

For the third couple, Despina Sellar as Ruth swept through yet another variation on marital indifference, expecting only the worst from everyone but particularly from her errant husband Norman. Blithely predatory, there remained an element of mystery in his make-up seems intended by the author: is Norman a calculating Casanova or merely an immature dreamer? Stuart Denman maintained this ambiguity; despite his self-justifying monologue, his motives remain somewhat opaque, which may be why he finally finds a degree of success with all three women. They deny anything of the sort, but as Ayckbourn says of Sarah: "She fancies Norman more than any of them, so she's fighting herself, and she's also fighting the sins of her sisters in law". It's been suggested that in the original production Norman was exposed as man drive not so much by lust as by the constant itch for attention; a point equally evident in Nigel Martin's stylish production. This was enhanced by Roger Beaumont's idiosyncratic setting, its shabby, outmoded pastel décor and threadbare upholstery attuned to the chaos of live-in daughter Annie.
"My plays are best appreciated", says Ayckbourn, "if you've had at least one unhappy marriage or at least one unhappy relationship, otherwise you won't know what's going on". Without presuming to hazard our audiences' domestic experiences they obviously found the kind of illumination he goes on to describe: "The best part of my work is not the clapping, it's the feeling that at the end of the evening you have given the most wonderful party and those who came are feeling better. I don't know, but they are sort of unified into a whole and that is marvellous".