Every 10 years or so, Alan Ayckbourn feels the urge to make people jump. In the early 1990s he interrupted a string of comedies to produce a one-act play called Haunting Julia which, unusually for him, contained all-male characters and, even more unusually, a ghost. Snake In the Grass is a pendant to that piece, featuring three traumatised women in a ghostly garden.
The difference is that in Haunting Julia the spooks were real, or at least as real as the props and sound departments could make them. At first Snake in the Grass looks suspiciously like a retread of the repertoire of theatrical ghost effects - wind chimes that play themselves, rocking chairs which rock unoccupied. It is as mysterious as a séance with an assistant stage manager under the table.
But, after a sluggish start, the play enters another dimension and becomes a far more subtle and powerful piece than the old ghost-thriller genre would seem to allow. All the requisite ingredients are here: a contested will, an attempted murder, a fortuitous power cut. But Ayckbourn reworks them to suggest that ghosts are really whatever it is that scares us the most, and raises uncomfortable questions about whether abusive love is preferable to no love at all.
The story features Annabel Chester, a failed, divorced businesswoman, who returns to the crumbling family pile following the death of her father. At home she finds Miriam, her unmarried sister; Alice, an ex-nurse who now nurses her grievances; and something nasty on the tennis-court, where the deceased man would hurl tennis balls and abuse at his daughters.
Ayckbourn's own production is distinguished by three superlative performances from Fiona Mollison and Susie Blake as the estranged sisters and Rachel Atkins as the nurse who comes between them. They add real flesh to a play that at first seems a load of old bones. Yet as a ghost thriller, Snake In the Grass surprisingly ends up having more in common with Hamlet than Gaslight.
· Until September 7. Box office 01723 370541.
