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.

Mark Bruce’s vision of this cultural foundation stone is dark, violent and sexy. The story of Odysseus’s return from Troy starts with his leave-taking from Penelope and their newborn son, Telemachus (Wayne Parsons) who we meet again, twenty years later, as an adult. Mr.Bruce has developed a style that incorporates dance and a kind of dumb show. But here is no series of melodramatic tableaux; rather flights of gymnastic abandon and vigorous purpose . . .