When the time comes for someone to inherit Alan Ayckbourn's mantle as the Molière of the middle classes, what's the betting it will be Torben Betts? Betts's milieu - the everyday battleground of domestic despair - is familiar, but whereas Ayckbourn's output has progressively darkened over 40 years, Betts's is practically suicidal already.
Clockwatching grinds through the gears of an annual cycle in which a delicate fabric of family relations becomes as frayed as an ancient pair of net curtains. There's a trail of satisfying, sardonic laughs en route, but little in the way of light relief.
Betts deploys characters at the extreme end of their tethers who, from the first act, seem ready to jump. Ayckbourn's plays often take you to the edge, but carefully escort you back behind the guide rope once you've seen what it looks like. Betts rather callously tips you straight into the abyss. It would be intolerable, were he not such a brilliant orchestrator of pain.
Betts's outstanding ability is to maintain several conversations in a variety of locations, and marshal them into a polyphony of comic cross purposes. In one magnificent scene, which occurs after the mother's death, the daughter unleashes a litany of pain about the pressures of life with a behaviourally challenged child, while her husband and his brother-in-law dismantle a bed and her dad intones a list of items from an old menu he has discovered among his deceased wife's effects. It's a superb, dissonant harmony of ululating anguish, cursed imprecations and the steady bass-line of beans, egg and mushrooms on toast.
Betts creates a quintet of equally weighted parts, which receive excellent performances in Sam Walters's sensitive production, imported from the Orange Tree, Richmond. Jane Arden is particularly fine as Anna, whose life with a disturbed child has become a living hell; as is Steven Elder as her husband, Duncan, a deflated bundle whose low self-esteem sees him shuffle into a morass of his own making. It's all funnily painful rather than painfully funny. But the best of Betts is no doubt still to come.
In rep until July 11. Box office: 01723 370541.
