Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars Don't be fooled by the initially kitsch-looking trappings of Alan Ayckbourn's 1972 dinner party comedy. If those last three words alone suggest something cringe-worthily middle-class, what forty-six years ago was painfully current now looks like a devastating prophecy of how property developing spivs came to rule the world. Taking place over three Christmas Eves, the play's conceit is to set each of three acts in the kitchen of the respective des-res where the assorted seasonal shindigs take place. This sees the action move from the suburban new build of the upwardly mobile Jane and Sidney Hopcroft, then to Eva and Geoffrey Jacksons' thoroughly modern apartment, before alighting at the crumbling pile owned by Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright. As relationships develop, what starts out as a sit-com style bit-of-a-do moves into a more troubling world barely hidden behind the party faces on show. The result in Richard Baron
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.