More marriages break up at Christmas than at any other time of the year. Here there are three unhappy marriages. When I last saw Alan Ayckbourn’s play in a touring production in 2006 I thought it was one of his best. Seeing it again in Marianne Elliott’s very disappointing production, it doesn’t seem that good. A major problem is the set which is far too big for the suburban house it is meant to be and far too big for the action that goes on in it. The first floor landing and attic are totally unnecessary.
Season’s Greetings, which dates from the early 1980s, is a sad farce, but that doesn’t make it any the less funny or any the less sad to watch. The two ingredients are so combined that some critics have rashly likened Ayckbourn to Chekhov.
The best performance is by Mike Gattis who plays the doctor who has written an excruciatingly boring and interminable puppet play about Three Little Pigs. He is such an inefficient doctor that he can’t tell whether a person is alive or dead. He has a splendid outburst when he accuses the psychotic ex-security guard (the ever-reliable David Troughton) of being “a snob, bigot, chauvinist, ignorant, insensitive, narrow minded, intolerant, humourless wart.”