One of Alan Ayckbourn’s toughest and funniest plays, this is about English social mobility. It is rather like some great English institutions: incomprehensible to foreigners, unregulated and sacrosanct.

Its three acts take place in the kitchens of three couples, kitchens being the great bourgeois giveaway. First, a fretful lower-middle-class couple (Jane Horrocks, David Bamber) expects a visit from a middle-middle-class one (Jenny Seagrove, David Horovitch), both having delusions of climbing higher. Next, a party at the home of a shifty, mealy-mouthed architect and his doolally, ostentatiously suicidal wife (John Gordon Sinclair, Lia Williams). Finally, the middle pair, now fallen into resentful penury, get an unwelcome Christmas visit from the others. The play could have been co-authored by Chekhov and Ray Cooney: it has the melancholy of social decay and the brilliant cruelty of a first-rate farce.

Alan Strachan’s production is as tight and ruthless as a hangman’s rope, and you come out with an irresistibly evil feeling of pleasure. The six actors are wickedly observant: they never mock or patronise their characters, because they know that all great comedies are driven by pain.

Garrick

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