That feels right, if tricky; what begins as a kind of farce, bubbling along with bright suburban absurdity, ends in another world of absurdity indeed, nearer the offhand cruelty of Harold Pinter. If it’s not quite the light comedy a summer audience was bargaining for, it’s also a bit more interesting — and more likely to last in memory past the next cocktail party.
Berger has assembled a troupe mixing Barrington regulars and new faces to play the three couples, and they work together with delightful ease as the play unfolds over three successive Christmases, in each of their three kitchens. Jo Winiarski’s three sets say as much about the characters’ relative class status and personalities as the script does, and Sara Jean Tosetti’s outrageous but accurate ’70s costumes also speak volumes.
We begin in the frighteningly tidy kitchen of Sidney and Jane, who have hopes of expanding their small general store into a more ambitious business. Jane’s slightly manic house-pride and Sidney’s pompous geniality quickly let us know that their Christmas cocktail party is more work than play; both Julia Coffey, as the perky Jane, and Robert Petkoff, as the officiously genial Sidney, hit every note of social anxiety and ambition that Ayckbourn’s script gives them. They’re also, as they scurry about the turquoise-and-yellow set trying to keep the evening’s comic mishaps from derailing their plans, quite funny.
They’re joined in the kitchen, despite all their efforts to keep their guests safely entertained in the other room, by the upper-crust banker, Ronald, and his impeccably coiffed wife, Marion, played with expert old-money style by Graeme Malcolm and Henny Russell. Serving as the middle-class bridge between these two extremes are the swinging architect, Geoff (Christopher Innvar, in what we devoutly hope is a shaggy toupee), and his wife, the depressive Eva, whose misery is made hilarious by Finnerty Steeves’s continual air of quiet desperation.
