Ayckbourn has become the biographer of the sexual peccadilloes and day-to-day emotional strain of middle England; it’s quirks and storms-in-teacups. In this collection of five short one-act plays, having tucked a string of successes under his belt he seems to be flexing his newly found dramatic muscles in a kind of, ‘Look what I can do’, display. In Mother Figure, a housebound mum, whose husband is permanently on the road and so has no one but the kids to talk to, has her brain reduced to milk-soaked wads. The condition renders her incapable of grown-up conversation so when a neighbour pops in her conversation continues its infantile habit. When the neighbour’s husband (Stephen Billington) comes looking for the house key the same reception class talk is soon mirrored by the bickering couple who quickly reveal the cracks in their marriage.

In Drinking Companion, Richard Stacey gives as good an account of a bar room bore rapidly becoming inebriated, as you’ll find on any stage. The state leads to a crass insensitivity, which fails to see the hopeless effect of his unwelcome attentions on two female sales reps, who have washed up in the same bar.

In Between Mouthfuls a new theatrical trick is unveiled whereby the audience only hears what the waiter in a restaurant hears as he moves between two dining tables. The always excellent, Russell Dixon, gave us an irascible business man which recalled John Betjeman’s:

And plump white fingers made to curl

Round some anaemic city girl

And so lend colour to the lives

And old suspicions of their wives.

The shape-and-age-shifting, Elizabeth Boag is his long suffering wife and the equally versatile, Emma Manton is the object of his lascivious eye, who is, coincidentally, on the other table with her husband, an employee of the older man. More relationship trouble ensues.

In Gosforth’s Fete, revelations in the tea tent, courtesy of a switched-on Tannoy microphone, announce to the village the paternity of Milly’s impending baby to be local publican, Gosforth (Russell Dixon). The scenario allows Ayckbourn to bring on some village favourites: a Lady Mayoress, a vicar (who reveals that the village already knew), a drunken scout-master and a tea lady – the aforementioned Milly (Emma Manton). All good fun.

A Talk in the Park is a slightly less than jolly take on British reserve and the tendency to be more concerned with one’s own problems than that of others as people in the park take turns to avoid the company of a stranger.

The excellent cast are colourful throughout. Perhaps in virtue of this rather than in spite of it one is continually disappointed to find that no sooner have we become interested in a character than the show moves on.    ★★★☆☆    Graham Wyles at Bath Theatre Royal on 16^th February 2016

Picture © Tony Bartholomew