Absent Friends

This 1974 study of a traumatic tea party was, as Alan Ayckbourn put it, an ­attempt to "sour the sugar" by ­creating a light comedy about death. The setting is a suburban soiree in which a group of friends offer tea and sympathy to Colin, who has lost his fiancee in an ­accident. Everybody skirts around the reason for the ­invitation ­except Colin himself, who has ­come to terms with his ­misfortune and hands around pictures of the ­deceased with blithe equanimity. Absent Friends is one of Ayckbourn's most favoured creations, but lacking in incident or ­obvious punchlines, it is not frequently revived. Nikolai Foster's ­production establishes a fine balance in which everyone tries to ignore the ­elephant in the room, even while its owner is doing his best to make it stand on its hind legs and wave its trunk. David Crellin's Colin is one of those great Ayckbournian agents of chaos, such as Trevor in Bedroom Farce and Norman in The Norman Conquests, whose placid self-absorption acts like the eye of the hurricane. Kerry Peers is great value as a woman who ­cathartically pours the contents of a cream jug over her husband's head, and Dominic Gately is enjoyably jittery as a man whose nervous energy drives everyone to distraction. Better a swift demise, perhaps, than the slow death of these relationships in terminal decline.