To call Absurd Person Singular Alan Ayckbourn’s finest comedy is quite a claim. After all, he has written more than 70 plays, most of them after this one appeared in 1972, some of them more likely to leave you hiccupping with laughter. But I can’t think of any that better illustrates his audacity. Last night I sensed an almost masochistic glee in Ayckbourn’s determination to set himself scary technical and emotional tests – and I felt he’d passed them all.

Who else would set a comedy on three consecutive Christmas Eves, not in the three different rooms where drinks parties are being thrown, but in the kitchens behind them? And who else would devote his middle act to a woman trying to gas, hang, poison, electrocute and defenestrate herself, only for each suicide attempt to be misinterpreted by guests who variously think she wants her oven cleaned, her light-flex mended or whatever?

It’s dark, it’s hilarious and, in Alan Strachan’s strongly cast, finely acted production, it is often both at once.

Take the scene in which Jane Horrocks’s Jane, who is happy only when she is polishing or washing, trills out carols and scrubs away while Lia Williams’s Eva, who has despaired of her marriage to John Gordon Sinclair’s philandering Geoff, arranges a noose or tries to open a tin of Paraquat. Or when David Bamber’s Sidney, the go-getting petit bourgeois in excelsis, forces Jenny Seagrove’s aristocratic, alcoholic Marion and her ineffective bank-manager husband, David Horovitch’s Ronald, to play a humiliating game of musical statues.

Each character is nicely delineated and each evolves during the play, Seagrove from arrogant assurance to drunken chaos, Williams through desperation to a new strength, and, most importantly, Sidney from hand-wringing insecurity to confidence and power.

And somewhere here is Ayckbourn’s point. The nobs decline. So does the bohemian Geoffrey, an architect whose latest building collapses. This little world ends up belonging to Sidney, the property developer, with his philosophy of dog-eat-dog.

This is a very 1970s portrait of social mobility; but, no, it doesn’t date the play. After all, Sidney is doing even better today and Marion is still more irrelevant. And what one notices is the scrupulous yet never overobvious detail Ayckbourn brings to his picture. Hair styles shift with status and mood, Williams’s preRaphaelite mop becoming a pageboy cut as she takes charge of her chastened husband. So do clothes, facial expressions, language, everything.

There’s a moment near the start when Seagrove’s Marion grandly but disingenuously commends Bamber’s obsequious Sidney for his “gorgeous cologne”, which is actually fly-spray he has turned on himself in a panic, and one at the end when she sways about with a gin-bottle while he stands in his dinner jacket on her kitchen table crying “dance, dance, dance”. Has Ayckbourn ever written about class divisions, casual callousness and his other pet topics with such incisive humour? I don’t think so.

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