Round and Round the Garden,

Theatre Royal Winchester

Watching and listening to this Alan Ayckbourn play allows you to savour a master craftsman at work.

Like Shakespeare, Ayckbourn is one of the world’s most popular and prolific playwrights. He has written 80 full length plays, they’ve been translated into more than 35 languages, regularly performed throughout the world.

Combining assured theatrical techniques with his distinctive comic pessimism, this is one of the three ever popular Norman Conquests, featuring assistant librarian Norman’s dreams, plans and schemes.

Written and set in 1973, exploring the prickly relationships between six characters over a summer weekend, Ayckbourn examines the emptiness of English social and family rituals, the joyful joylessness of some middle-class marriages, and still manages to make audiences laugh.

The detailed garden stage set, with its statue, brambles, deck chairs, and grey pebble-dashed house is convincing and atmospheric; costumes are beautifully redolent of the 70s.

The Noel Cowardesque comic tone is often bitter and astringent, but aided by six talented actors and assured direction by Chris Jordan, the audience can chortle at the characters’ predicaments while feeling the pain of shared experience.

Although sharing dramatic themes of selfishness, calculation, and empty desperation with Ibsen and Chekhov, unlike those literary heavyweights, Ayckbourn manages to dissect the human heart with a delicious lightness of touch.

Brendan McCusker

Halfway through a four-month UK tour, Round and Round the Garden runs at Winchester until Saturday March 12, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday.

Tickets: 01962 840440 or theatreroyalwinchester.co.uk