Black Comedy: Mixes physical comedy and emotional cringe

Patricia Allison (Clea) - (Sam Taylor)

It’s 100 years since Peter Shaffer was born and 61 years since his short, frantic farce was premiered by the National Theatre at Chichester. Caroline Steinbeis’s revival is another example of the Orange Tree under Tom Littler mining both the British and the international canon of seldom-revived classics. It’s almost more interesting as a period piece than as a finely-crafted but absurd mix of physical comedy and emotional cringe.

We’re in a South Kensington flat in 1965, where bohemian artists and liberated girls are usurping a world of retired colonels and primly sermonising spinsters. Wartime immigrants are part of every tier of society and one character’s homosexuality is barely veiled. All of which is secondary, of course, to the central conceit, which is the reversal of the states of light and darkness.