THESE are the characters we hate to love… as tasteless as a strawberry meringue and more insipid than a pint of keg beer.

Yes, you’ve guessed. We’re back in the 1970s, a time of Cotswold stone fireplaces, rock stadium-size home stereo systems and excruciating tea parties being thrown by the wives of company men in their constant quest to impress and please.

Diana (Lisa Burrows) is hosting a get-together for the important people in husband Paul’s life. Not that real friendship ever enters the equation… upwardly mobile Paul (Kevin Drury) has no regard for anyone, least of all for jittery John (John Dorney) whose wife often finds herself horizontal on the back seat of the boss’s executive motor.

Of course, John puts up with his wife’s infidelity – good for promotion prospects, you see – even if the vacuous, gum-chewing Evelyn (Kathryn Ritchie) hardly seems worth fighting over.

This jumpy car wreck of a man is caught between the two of them, rather like that ubiquitous chunk of cocktailed pineapple trapped amid the lump of cheese and the glace cherry.

The acting in this comedy of manners by Alan Ayckbourn is first class, the cast demonstrating a growing unity of purpose as the piece lurches from one cringe-inducing scene to the next.

Susie Emmett as Marge is straight out of the Alison Steadman school of nasal-voiced insincerity, matched only by the creepy Colin (Pete Collis), the kind of person who would drive anyone to jump from a moving train if encountered in one of the carriages.

Absent Friends anticipated the now-legendary Abigail’s Party by four years. But unlike the later period piece, Ayckbourn’s play effortlessly travels down the decades.

For only the width of the men’s ties and the women’s bobbed hairstyles change… otherwise, human nature remains exactly the same.

Absent Friends runs until Saturday (August 22).

John Phillpott