Imagine writing down everything that makes you smile, uplifts you, pleases you, makes you momentarily happy. Now suppose you start the list aged seven (starting with ice cream) and keep adding and adding with everything that delights you and those around you, including first love and abiding love. Like much of what is good in life it is inclusive: so here we find ‘peeing in the sea when no one knows’, ‘the jangling sound of keys’, ‘the smell of books’ and ‘a hairdresser who listens to what you want’. . . To spin gold from a mere list is no mean feat and this show produces it by the yard.

Rodney Ackland was, in the 1930s, ranked alongside Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward and J B Priestley as a playwright of note. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls never goes away, Rattigan is always being revived and Coward is, well, Coward. But Rodney Ackland? His play Before the Party, adapted from Somerset Maugham’s short story, does little to persuade us of the status he once, apparently, commanded. Whereas the plays of other the three aforementioned writers are equally stuck in time and place they are either relevant today or are very witty. Before the Party, sadly was neither