ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, then touring until October 16. Tickets and venues: londonclassictheatre.co.uk

A trio of mismatched suburban families spend three increasingly fraught Christmas Eves together in Alan Ayckbourn’s 1972 play that marked him out as a social observer and farceur of the highest order.

The first hosts are shopkeeper and dictator-in-waiting Sidney Hopcroft (Paul Sandys) and his wife Jane (Felicity Houlbrooke), obsessively cleaning the kitchen before their guests arrive. They are hoping for a business loan from the vague and imperious bank manager, Ronald BrewsterWright (Graham O’Mara) accompanied by gin-soaked snob of a wife, Marian (Roseanna Miles).

Geoffrey Jackson (John Dorney) is the louche architect whose extramarital dalliances have sent his wife Eva (Helen Keely) spiralling into depression. But the balance of power shifts each year as the Hopcrofts’ fortunes rise and the marriages of the two professional couples unravel.

Ayckbourn skewers 1970s attitudes and casual misogyny with gleeful malice and this production from London Classic Theatre wisely avoids updating a period piece that is funny, shocking and sad.

The audible gasps from the audience at some of the men’s dialogue suggests it has lost little of its discomfiting power and the physical farce that becomes increasingly absurd is well choreographed, such as Eva attempting various methods of suicide as the others blithely undertake household repairs.

Imagine Georges Feydeau crossed with Mike Leigh and you’re halfway there.