Alan Ayckbourn's latest production is so riddled with woeful stagecraft that it's hard to know where to begin: terrible lighting, coarse acting, clodhopping direction - good job it's all a joke.
First performed in 1984, A Chorus of Disapproval is a brilliant satire of Thatcherite social economics as perceived through Pendon Amateur Light Opera Society's dismal attempt to stage the Beggar's Opera.
It was a doubly clever idea, given that John Gay's assault on 18th-century immorality had already been updated once by Brecht and Weill into a satire on Weimar Germany. Ayckbourn took the idea a stage further, reflecting the you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours philosophy of the 1980s, through the petty internal politics of the am-dram crowd.
Ayckbourn's terrific revival proves that it still stands as one of his most finely tuned pieces of dramatic engineering.
Standard theatrical form demands a good beginning, middle and ending. Here Ayckbourn produces a strong ending, a middle, and another ending. The play opens with the cheeky conceit of a curtain call, then moves full circle through the progress of nervous newcomer, Guy Jones, as he blithey shifts from bit-part player to dashing lead, stepping into his colleague's roles, relationships and even their underpants along the way.
Bill Champion carries a wonderfully bemused expression as this ludicrously cast lothario, whose only real fault is an inability to say no. But the show is dominated by Philip York's garrulous portrayal of the director Dafydd ap Llewellyn, whose bumptious ego is a fragile carapace around a man whose domestic life is in crisis.
As for the rest of the cast: they couldn't carry a tune in a bucket - and are marvellous, it goes without saying.
· Until August 7. Box office: 01723 370541.
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