NOBODY has ever asked me to a safari party and, after seeing and intermittently chuckling at Tim Firth’s Ayckbournesque comedy, I shall certainly refuse any such invitation that comes my way.

One household produces the hors d’oeuvre. Then you move on to another, where you eat the main dish. Then it’s off to a third for pudding and, if Firth is to be believed, for furious recriminations and near disaster, none of them caused by the lousy food.

The scene is north Cheshire and rural sentimentality and the exploitation of heritage nerds are the main topics. Adam and Dan, impecunious sons of a drunken, violent farmer who has just shot himself, have sold their kitchen table for £60 to an antique dealer called Inga, telling her it was made from the planks of the boat from which their grandpa serenaded their grandma on the River Dee. In turn, she’s sold it to nouveau-riche Lol and Esther for £2,500, pretending it’s a traditional Cheshire “buttyball table” and passing off the bullet-marks as holes for what she says was a sort of kitchen golf.

You’d have to be an idiot or a caricature to believe such a tale and, fortunately for Firth’s plot, John Branwell’s Lol and Christine Moore’s Esther are both. He blusters noisily about, delivering himself of xenophobic cracks meant to damn him and amuse us:

“Humour and Germans, it’s like showing crosswords to fish,” that sort of thing. She looks like a vast pink blancmange, and talks the way one would too, finding rustic idylls and echoes of Jane Austen in anything old and dirty. I’d no problem with the two performers’ energy but much with their plausibility.

Anyway, the table is discovered in the chi-chi conservatory that replaces the decaying kitchen in which Daniel Crowder’s Adam and Daniel Casey’s Dan have been passing off grotty titbits as Cheshire “tollycurney”. So to revelations, confrontations, even some pretty preposterous gun-waving. Firth seems to want to remind us of the poverty, ugliness and despair behind the cosy farmhouse door, but his play wouldn’t have the weight to do so even without its nice, comforting ending.

I called the play Ayckbournesque, not only because of Firth’s attempts to darken his comedy, nor just because he introduces an impossible DIY table, wonky security lighting and other such trademark gadgetry, but because Sir Alan himself is the director. Well, he and his protégé have served up an amusing, undemanding evening and, with three changes of place, allowed the new Hampstead Theatre to show its scenic paces. Maybe that’s enough. Or maybe not.

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