Halfway through a 17-theatre national tour, this Alan Ayckbourn gem delighted a Winchester audience.

Set during a middle-England afternoon tea party in 1974, this hugely enjoyable play – Ayckbourn’s 14th in a current total of 79 – is an astute study in social embarrassment.

On a convincing 1970s stage set, with meticulous period details and costumes, three married couples – including an absent on-the-phone hypochondriac – await the arrival of Colin, a mutual friend whose partner has recently died.

As always with Ayckbourn comedy-dramas, the awkward silences are as revealing and eloquent as the well crafted lines.

The script is deliciously sprinkled with innuendoes, double-entendres, dramatic irony, and Ayckbourn’s social insights are always excruciatingly delightful.

As the unhappily married party hosts Paul and Diana, Kevin Drury and Catherine Harvey convey superbly a couple whose brittle relationship is splintering, despite their sophisticated veneer of respectability and comfort, with their children packed off unwillingly to boarding school.

Playing the pivotal late-arriving absent friend Colin, Ashley Cook smoothly provides the perceptive insights that the other characters fail to appreciate.

Alan Ayckbourn’s writing is so brilliantly entertaining that his characters can easily slip into caricatures – the hyperactive John can be a tad too twitchy, gum-chewing Evelyn a little over-aggressive, and the overbearing bossy Marge can rely too much on Alison Steadman’s classic portrayal of the odious Beverly in Mike Leigh’s wonderful Abigail’s Party.

Absent Friends plays King’s Theatre, Southsea, Tuesday and Wednesday May 26 & 27.

Brendan McCusker