I was a bit sniffy about Michael Frayn's comedy when it first appeared in 1976. If it now seems, in Joanna Read's revival, a much better play, that is partly because one views it through the perspective of Frayn's later work: like Noises Off, it is very much about order and chaos and the collapse of carefully structured worlds.
If time has changed my perception, that is highly appropriate, since Frayn's play is about the alterations wrought by the years. What we see is a group of middle-aged alumni returning to their old Oxbridge college for a drunken reunion. Like the master's wife, now a lay judicial figure who was once an injudicious lay, they have largely reconstructed their personalities. But under the influence of port and circumstance they revert to their rowdier younger selves: the camp cleric loses his inhibitions, the Master's wife her dress and the junior education minister his earnest reputation.
Frayn was clearly out to write a philosophical comedy; but, whereas in Noises Off the ideas emerge through the headlong action, here they tend to come in separate compartments. There is also a touch of contrivance about the long confessional speech delivered by the myopic master's wife to the wrong man: she'd have to be Mrs Magoo for that to be really plausible. But the play's virtues far outweigh its faults and Frayn invents one genuinely inspired character: a dedicated parasitologist ("The whole alimentary canal lies open to me") who spent three years living out of college, gets missed off all the lists and is now determined to recapture his lost years. As played excellently by Robert Whelan, he has both the anonymity and bubbling anger of a character like Abel Drugger in Jonson's The Alchemist.
Indeed, Read's production brings out one of Frayn's strengths: the vitality he gives to minor characters. Peter Rylands's gay curate clearly has an unresolved passion for the group's dandified heterosexual cynic and Michael Stroud's dignified head porter shocks everyone by daring to appear - because of industrial action - in sports jacket and flannels. But the plum role is that of the master's wife, beautifully taken by Amanda Harris who, in her mix of outward bossiness and latent sensuality, sums up the whole theme of the play: the precariousness of the personalities we carefully construct for ourselves. As the camp curate might say, it's clearly time for further explorations of Frayn's extensive back-catalogue.
· Until February 16. Box office: 01722 320333.
