It's a well-established fact that there is a significant rise in the rate of divorces, suicides and familial violence over the festive season. What is less commonly observed is the concurrent rise of Christmas plays concerned with the above.
So far this winter we've had Linda Brogan's What's In The Cat at Contact Manchester, about a Yuletide fall-out in an Irish-Jamaican household, and Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings, a classic of the genre that received a fine revival at Liverpool Playhouse. Now the dependable Hull Truck regular Gordon Steel weighs in with his own tale of tinsel-strewn trauma.
Steel's observations adopt a familiar formula: nuts that nobody eats, gifts that nobody wants and company that nobody can stand. The chief architect of discontent is Frank (Robert Hudson), an unemployed humbug who expresses the theory that Christmas is a conspiracy devised by women - though this is before we learn that his hyper-stressed wife Jean (Jackie Lye) has been marching him around Asda at five in the morning. Any prospect of a peaceful Christmas is destroyed by the necessity of entertaining the in-laws: Harry (Jason Furnival), a complacent industrialist overly enamoured of the letter K (as in: "Gorra new speedboat. Only cost 30K") and Doreen (Christine Cox), a waspish modern Malaprop whose Greek holidays have given her a taste for fetish cheese.
Add a pair of neighbours with a karaoke machine and you have - well, a big bundle of cliches, if the truth be told. Yet there's a robust energy to Gareth Tudor-Price's production, and a generous supply of decent jokes. It's not subtle, but Steel's comedy is a perfect post-Christmas tonic.
· Until January 21. Box office: 01482 323638.
