Anyone who has ever been a member of a committee, whether local authority, club, church or charity event will empathise with the characters, or at least some of them, in this play.

Someone once said a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Alan Ayckbourn illustrates this hypothesis with hilarious insight.

Prolific comedy actor Robert Daws plays Ray Dickson, the well-intentioned convenor and chairman of a committee he sets up to create a folk festival, for which the central attraction will be a pageant commemorating the massacre in their town of a dozen protesting agricultural workers a couple of hundred years earlier. Although no-one but Ray seems to know this bit of history.

Daws is brilliant at the deadpan earnestness of a man quickly out of his depth but blissfully unaware of the fact.

His project is hi-jacked by an ultra left-wing young college tutor, Eric (Craig Gazey) who also begins a liaison with one of the other committee members, dog breeder Sophie (Gemma Oaten).

Eric instantly raises the hackles of Ray’s ultra right-wing wife Helen (Deborah Grant), and the committee becomes a battle ground, metaphorically and ultimately literally.

Muddying the waters are Donald (Mark Curry), recruited for his council connections which deliver less than promised, and Laurence (Robert Duncan) a local businessman who is too overwhelmed by his personal problems to pay much attention to anything else.

The cast is completed by Audrey (Elizabeth Power), Tim (Harry Gostelow), and Philippa (Rhiannon Handy).

Ayckbourn’s genius is in revealing the undercurrents, the hidden agendas and the vulnerability of the toughest of characters. This cast does him proud.

Jo Bayne