Last year´s edition of Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto hosted the national premiere of "A Little Game Without Consequences" and was a great success: the show eventually totaled 1,414 spectators in 15 performances, giving us a turnout of 236 percent over the budgeted capacity.
This year The Kitchen Company will return to the stage with a hilarious comic trilogy "The Conquests of Norman" by Alan Ayckbourn, again directed by from Eleonora d´Urso.

Norman's Conquests

by Alan Ayckbourn
direction Eleonora d'Urso
with Elisabetta Becattini - Ruth, Daria D'Aloia - Annie, Simone Francia - Reg,
Valeria Perdonò - Sarah, Giuseppe Pestillo - Norman, Giovanni Prosperi - Tom

lighting design Raffaele Perin
assistant director Giulia Santilli
illustrations Alessandro Rak

production HurlyBurly
in collaboration with La Corte Ospitale

A delightful country house on the outskirts of London. A July weekend in 1973. A sick mother and a cat who will never see each other. An elopement that will go to awry. Some wine with a very high alcohol content. A game from table that has nothing realistic about it. Lunches and dinners to based on salad. Three couples for a total of six characters constantly at war with each other and pitted against each other from a catastrophic gigolo who has more the features of a scarecrow, namely: Norman.
Here are all the ingredients that sum up Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy The Conquests of Norman - "In the Garden," "In the Room from dining," and "In the Living Room." Three sweeping comedies that tell the stories of three couples who find themselves to spending a weekend in the countryside and who, between the living room, the garden and the from dining room, are forced, in spite of themselves, to to face disasters caused by advances that Norman cannot refrain from making to all the women present. A peaceful summer weekend thus turns into a veritable civil war fought to blows of envy, spitefulness, spitefulness, stolen kisses, rumpled beds, relentless misunderstandings, ill-given punches, thrown cookies, brothy stews, unlistenable jokes and carpets tangled around to who, of the carpet, will know how to make unusual use of it.
Three comedies and one comedy.
Three interchangeable plays that can be seen in any order one wishes without detracting from their understanding of the story or their comic potential. The fun-loving viewer can decide which and how many of the three comedies to see, in a crescendo of comedy that will go hand in hand with his or her curiosity.
The ending is to surprise, and it will be up to the viewer to find out if each of the three comedies has its own or if they all share the same.
Fat laughs are assured!

The decision to offer Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy The Conquests of Norman at the 53rd Festival dei 2 Mondi was born from out of my very personal falling in love with the text and its extraordinary comic potential.
In 2008, I had the good fortune to see the entire trilogy performed at the Old Vic in London, thanks to an enterprising Kevin Spacey who strongly wanted the trilogy on the bill after an absence from the London stage of no less than thirty-four years.
I was part of that mass of people who made the Old Vic sell out for four months. A crowd of spectators who entered the theater with one clear intention: to be entertained! Thanks to the pen of Alan Ayckbourn, undisputed master of British comedy.
from child, every time I went to theater, I wondered, without giving myself an answer, where it was that the characters went when they left the stage, and if, for example, to any of them were told, "Go into the living room!", I imagined beyond the wings a real house, hidden from my view and made up of rooms that I would never see. I wondered, curious, what was going on to that character in that phantom invisible living room, and if he, too, on re-entering the scene, told me that it would be much more interesting to witness it directly.
Right from here, perhaps, Alan Ayckbourn started, from his child's eye, from his curious spectator's eye, and decided to tell, as only he knows how to do, the same story, the same overwhelming comedy of loves, intrigues, conquests, quarrels, misunderstandings, rants, betrayals, weaknesses, passions, envy, spite... divided, however, into three parts, or rather, it is really the case to say, fragmented in three different places of the same house: the living room, the from dining room and the garden, the three places that give precisely the title to the three plays that make up the trilogy.
The time frame is the same for all three comedies, in fact everything happens between the morning of a Saturday and the morning of the Monday that follows, just as the three pairs of characters are also the same and the love plot the same, yet the comedy becomes double, becomes triple, hand in hand with the comedies that the viewer chooses to see.
The dramaturgical strength of the trilogy, the idea behind the success of The Conquests of Norman, is that each of the individual comedies encapsulates the whole story, and the viewer who will watch to just one of the three will laugh just the same, enjoying a hilarious show full of twists and turns.
At the same time, that curious and fun-loving viewer who, after seeing "In the from dining room," decides to also see "In the living room" or "In the garden" or both - with no specific order in which to watch them - will discover what I from child could not to discover, namely what happened to the characters in the other rooms of the house when they left the scene.
Ayckbourn's intuition to allow the viewer to have both a single and a global view is as simple as it is effective, as it allows comedy to be added to comedy, in an unparalleled crescendo.
I invite the audience to to indulge in the fun of watching to three different shows and to discovering, along the way, that the show they are seeing is incredibly still the same but seen from an increasingly hilarious angle.

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Eleonora d'Urso

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