Of course, Simon is enjoying a certain renewed popularity, perhaps because people — and, even more, producers — look for tried-and-true comedies in uncertain economic times. So why not Ayckbourn? The two share a mid-20th-century-male outlook on life, an almost frighteningly fertile cleverness, and a deft hand with one-liners and plotting. If they also share a certain glibness, and a tendency to pull back whenever their characters threaten to expose the sorrows beneath their highly amusing surfaces . . . well, what the heck, it’s summer.
And if you’re going to spend an evening with Ayckbourn’s characters, you might as well do so when they’re performed by a gang of highly skilled comic actors. Eric C. Engel, Gloucester’s artistic director, has brought together just such a gang on Jenna McFarland Lord’s pitch-perfect set, a slightly fusty country-house dining room in which every angle is just a little bit askew.
First we have Sarah Newhouse as Annie, the most put-upon of the three siblings in the story: She’s stayed home to take care of their invalid mother while the other two, Reg (played by Richard Snee) and Ruth (Jennie Israel) have gone off to lead their own lives. Now Annie is taking a weekend off, so genial but clueless Reg and his take-charge, take-no-prisoners wife, Sarah (Lindsay Crouse), have arrived to handle the household duties.
Trouble breaks out, though, when Sarah discovers that Annie is going off not with Tom (Barlow Adamson), the sweet but passive veterinarian who’s been hanging around her for years without making a move, but with the titular Norman (Steven Barkhimer), who is married to none other than Ruth — yes, Annie’s own sister. Sarah intervenes, Norman gets drunk, Ruth shows up, and the usual comic complications build up and then come tumbling down.
