The Norman Conquests, The Old Vic

The Old Vic has had an exhilarating personality-rethink. Taking temporary leave of its traditional end-on proscenium arch set-up, this venerable venue has been reconfigured as an in-the-round theatre. With the floor raised to just below the level of the old dress circle, the actors, who perform on a central circular stage, and the audience, who are arranged right around them, now very much share the same space – a room that is a miraculous combination of intimacy and grandeur.

The re-jigged joint inevitably loses some seating capacity and so would doubtless be unsustainable economically in the long term. But you can see it at its best in Matthew Warchus's wonderfully entertaining, fluent, and expertly acted production of a three-part work for which it provides the ideal design. In fact, the whole theatre becomes a metaphor for the medium and the message of The Norman Conquests. Like in-the-round theatre, Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy of plays – first seen in London in 1974 – gives you different perspectives on the same events and suggests there is no one position of God-like privilege from which they can be viewed.

At the marathon press day, the management enterprisingly shifted reviewers from one part of the theatre to another for each separate play. The ploy brought home just how egalitarian the in-the-round arrangement is. If my favourite angle was the one you get in the seating area situated on the old proscenium stage, it's because you look out at the theatre from the point of view of all the great actors (Olivier, Gielgud, Maggie Smith et al) who have performed there – or rather, elatingly, from the point of view they would have had if they had happened to be levitating at the time.

Having slept with his sister-in-law Annie at Christmas, assistant librarian Norman has scheduled a rematch in a coastal resort at midsummer. Enslaved to a demanding, bedridden mother, Annie deserves a break and her estate agent brother Reg and his control freak wife, Sarah, have come down to relieve her of her duties pro tem. Not that they know that Norman is part of the equation. Nor would they ever have done so, had he not deviated from the plan and surreptitiously arrived at the mother's home to check that Annie was still willing. Thwarted by the jealous Sarah of his dirty weekend, Norman decides to stay put while going psychologically awol and while keeping his options open with both women and with his wife Ruth whom the severe Sarah summons to the house.

The Norman Conquests comprises three full-length plays – Table Manners; Living Together; and Round and Round the Garden – that present the same frustrating weekend as it elapses in the dining room, sitting room and garden. What was offstage in one play is on-stage in another and vice versa. Nearly every exit is an entrance somewhere else. A would-be three-times-a-night gigolo trapped in an unbalanced haystack of a body, Norman certainly lives up to his self-description in Stephen Mangan's brilliantly funny performance – a subversive, semi-winning shit. The plays afford a progressively less endearing take on Norman. Yes, compared to the other terminally dull men, he's the spirit of romantic anarchy, but Jessica Hynes's superb Annie deserves somebody better than weekend Tristan.

Written in the early days of Seventies feminism, the play now seems to fluctuate between period piece and a drama ahead of its time. The comic spontaneity and the brilliant acting – from Paul Ritter as friendly nerd Reg; Amanda Root as the enviously reproving Sarah and Amelia Bullimore as Norman's bread-winning businesswoman wife – prevent the proceedings from feeling the least groundhog-day-repetitive. Plays that have a tricksy time scheme can be rebarbative if they give the audience the sense of being a know-all voyeur. Ayckbourn avoids that impression here. It's significant that the character who deludedly feels by the end that he now has the jigsaw sorted is Ben Miles's Tom, a repressed vet who has spent three years failing to pop any question of interest to poor Annie.

I recommend seeing the whole trilogy. It's heaven in triplicate.

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