ABSENT FRIENDS Harold Pinter Theatre

Alan Ayckbourn has always had a soft spot for this sad comedy. Written in 1974, it was a major turning point in career and his middle-class suburban dramas from then on became bleaker and bleaker. The play has two themes: the embarrassment and taboo of death, and the death of love in marriage. A man’s wife drowns. His friends feel he needs cheering up and invite him round for tea. The irony is he doesn’t need cheering up and every time he opens his mouth, he depresses everybody with his unwanted advice and, inadvertently, reminding them just how awful their own marriages are. Reece Shearsmith is the wrong actor for this nerdish catalyst; wrong because he alone is the only one who is too obviously a comic character. Katherine Parkinson gets it absolutely right, very funny and very pitiful at the same time, as the wife who has a complete mental breakdown. She knows her husband is cheating her and with whom, and, absurdly, wishes she had joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Elizabeth Berrington is spot on, too, as the wife who is married to an obese man who remains off-stage and is always ill and phones her from his sick-bed where various farcical disasters befall him. Kara Tointon, with very little to say, is also perfect as a gum-chewing, magazine-reading, deeply unpleasant woman, who is married to a born loser. The tears and hysterics in act one are particularly well orchestrated in Jeremy Herrin’s production and designer Tom Scott’s living-room is a very good joke on the 1970’s hideous bad taste.