Truth lost in Absent Friends

YOU know what it's like - your husband's best friend has suffered a bereavement, so you invite him round for tea and sympathy.

True, no one has seen said best friend for three years or met the deceased, but you've made the sandwiches, brewed the tea and asked a couple more pals round for support. But before you can say how sorry you are, the tea party is disintegrating under the weight of crumbling marriages and strained nerves.

Alan Ayckbourn's world is like that - brittle relationships stretched to their limit shatter spectacularly, while others built on smug complacency are held up to ridicule.

Not that Colin, the fiancé recently deprived of the love of his life in a drowning accident, is aware of any of it.

Atmosphere seems to pass him by as he bounces in exuding chirpy optimism and rose-tinted bonhomie, spreading good cheer among those who were supposed to be sending it in his direction.

Mark Powell's production at Salisbury Playhouse is very funny but there is a strong sense of seventies sit-com to the characterisation, which doesn't sit well with Ayckbourn's ability to create very real people in excruciating situations.

Mannerisms are overdone, reactions exaggerated and an element of truth lost.

That's not to say that audiences won't have a good laugh.

Certainly the packed first night crowd found much to amuse them from Neil Madden's irritating nervous tics as fidgetty John, jingling coins in his pocket and incessantly jigging from foot to foot, to the deadpan putdowns of Evelyn (Hayley Jayne Standing).

Daffy blonde fashion slave Marge (Barbara Durkin) totters round the stage on platform shoes and dishes out medical advice by phone to accident prone husband Gordon while Sarah Bull's nervy Diana needs only the combined sarcasm of husband Paul (Andonis Anthony) and kindly smiles of Colin (Paul Kemp) to tip her over the edge into tearful hysteria.

But it was all a bit two dimensional and Ayckbourn is a better craftsman than that.

- Lesley Bates