BWW Reviews: SEASON'S GREETINGS, Union Theatre, December 5 2013

I saw Season's Greetings three years ago at the National Theatre and admired it more than liked it. The production was technically perfect and clever (as one would expect of an Ayckbourn script) but, perhaps, just a little too pleased with itself, the author's hand hoving into view too frequently as characters are moved on and off stage.

In the smaller space of the Union Theatre, Michael Strassen's revival of the 1980 comedy feels looser - with lighting and furniture used to identify different rooms and the actors not drowned by the sets - and is all the better as a result. There's still a bit of farce-style charging about, but the dashing follows the action rather than drives it.

In a comfortable middle-class house (albeit cluttered with some examples of the late 70s' disastrous approach to design) husbands and wives arrive for the ordeal that is a family Christmas. Everyone talks all the time, but nobody says what's really on their minds (this is England, pre-Diana, after all) until matters slide from the manageably miserable to the dangerously damaging.

Abigail Rosser's Belinda (sex-starved and desperate for it) and Pandora McCormick's Rachel (sex-starved and fearful of it) are the sisters who provide the space in which the other characters complacently sprawl or agonisingly squirm. Belinda's husband Neville (played with gallons of middle-class smugness by John Dornley) chooses not to see what's going on under his nose, whether it's best friend and ex-business partner Eddie's (Jim Mannering) desperate need to be taken back under his wing or Belinda's flirting with Rachel's not-quite-boyfriend Clive (Gavin Kerr). With JoAnna Kirkland's Pattie just about coping as Eddie's ignored wife, it's all hideous, but survivable.

Except that Neville's sister Phyllis (Marianne Adams, very funny on the booze) and her man-on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown husband Bernard (a twitchy Matthew Carter) are also staying over and they have serious problems. But not as serious as retired security guard Uncle Harvey (Harry Saks), whose love for violence trumps all the neuroses around him by toppling into psychosis.

If audiences are expected at this time of year to shout "Behind You!" at the stage, in Season's Greetings, we want to shout "In Front Of You!" as all the problems are there right in front of the characters, if only they would acknowledge them - before it's too late that is. So this Christmas classic is as much a tragedy as comedy, and leaves you, somewhat uneasily, thinking about one's own Christmas when the lights go up and the applause dies down.

Season's Greetings continues at The Union Theatre until 4 January.