Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1980) presents a typical, instantly recognisable British Christmas: a medley of family and friends reluctantly gathering for an orgy of consumption and feigned festivity that is inevitably disturbed by the eruption of old grievances and new quarrels. Within this deceptively simple scenario, Ayckbourn uses black comedy, farce and finely sketched characters to meticulously dissect the less-than-jolly feelings that forcefully disrupt the Christmas season’s mandated merriment. We experience both guilty pleasure and painful recognition as we laugh and wince at Ayckbourn’s all-too-human characters struggling with sorrowful marriages, sexual dysfunction, neuroses, addiction, simmering resentment, frustration and sorrow. All of the Christmas ‘types’ are here: the unhappy, passive-aggressive mum whose quest for perfection creates only boredom and antipathy; the affable but neglectful and distracted dad; the prejudiced, insulting uncle who simmers resentfully in front of the telly; the unhappy-in-love sister moping in the corner; and the embarrassing drunken auntie. Ayckbourn is particularly perceptive about how the futile quest for a ‘perfect’ Christmas ratchets up the pressure and ironically exposes the niggling doubts, resentments and miseries that undermine the whole enterprise. Tellingly, the nine children that the adults are determined to make happy are never seen on stage and are instead badgered, buffeted, cuffed and insulted offstage by the miserable, harassed adults.

Ayckbourn’s plot is simple, but it is in his characters and their relationships that the play’s action resides. Belinda Bunker, the tired, strained orchestrator of the gathering, is an unhappy, nagging wife, longing for recognition and support from her distracted husband, Neville. His sister Phyllis is an anxious alcoholic whose gentle, ineffectual husband, Bernard, is obsessed with flawlessly performing his overlong, over-earnest puppet show that is secretly loathed by adults and children alike. Neville’s boorish friend Eddie lazily neglects his children and his disheartened pregnant wife, Pattie. Belinda’s lonely sister Rachel, who is restrained and cautious where her sister is impetuous and ardent, brings along her lukewarm paramour Clive, a barely successful writer who bewilderedly pursues a cringe-inducing Mills and Boon style affair with Belinda. Maliciously overseeing events is Harvey, Neville and Phyllis’s aggressive, practical joker uncle, whose paranoia about crime results in an awful and hilarious act of violence in the final act.

The verbal dexterity, farcical comedy and bittersweet melancholy of Ayckbourn’s plays are dependent on a strong company and this cast proves itself adroit at conveying the piece’s emotional shifts, although some performances feel a little underpowered and there are some struggles with lines and cues. Lynne O'Sullivan plays Belinda with admirable weariness, conveying a flavour of Abigail’s Party as a glamorous woman straining to observe social niceties, please her motley, dysfunctional guests, engage the attention of her lazy husband, and wanly spread some Christmas cheer. She is especially funny when Belinda’s exhausted crabbiness gives way to girlish flirtation upon Clive’s arrival. Joe Banks as her husband Neville easefully conveys the character’s infuriating distractedness, but he is less convincing when the character turns nasty. Helen McCormack is an absolute delight as the drunken, inappropriate Phyllis: her tipsy attempt to seduce Clive, which ends in uproarious confusion about the sexual proclivities of railway men, was one of the evening’s highlights. Martin Shaw as her peevish, prissy and angrily muddled husband Bernard, skilfully balances the competing elements within his character, making him both irritating and sympathetic – his disastrous puppet show is another comic highlight.

Andy Murton as Eddie and Sacha Walker as Pattie capably communicate the misery of a floundering, unhappy couple, while John Chapman is brilliant as the imposing, malevolent Harvey who mercilessly skewers Bernard’s puppet show. Ruth Sullivan mines Rachel’s unhappiness to great comic effect, but she also adeptly secures the audience’s sympathy by communicating Rachel’s aching loneliness. As the outsider to this familial stew of misery, Alex Kearley-Shiers is charmingly baffled and hesitant as Clive, although he sometimes struggles to convey the character’s cockiness.

Gigi Robarts is gifted with a fine cast with great comic talent and her direction is straightforward and generally sure-footed. The pacing, though, particularly during the play’s more farcical moments, such as Belinda and Clive’s aborted seduction beneath the Christmas tree, is occasionally uneven and such scenes could be more swiftly and tightly performed. The final scenes of the production, especially Harvey’s shocking and funny shooting of Clive, feel under-rehearsed and the shift from comedy to tragedy is not as sharply focused as it could be. The handsome split-level staging, skilfully designed by Ippolita Valentinetti and Michael Bettell, admirably evokes the late 1970s, although some of the internal walls may have been better conveyed via set rather than the slightly jilted movement of the actors.

As another Christmas approaches once again and people everywhere look with trepidation to returning home, Season’s Greetings remains a delightful, if quite wince-inducing, treat, performed with gusto by a hard-working cast.

Photography by David Sprecher