Watching Alan Ayckbourn’s 1976 tragicomedy is like falling into a portal in which wives quietly have nervous breakdowns as they cook and clean, husbands tinker in garages to get away from them and mother-in-laws rule the roost.
A cramped garage is an apt setting for this domestic grubbiness as two working-class couples meet, become friends, celebrate birthdays and variously unravel into marital malaise or mental breakdown. The old banger of a Mini in the garage is what triggers the drama: Dennis (Tom Richardson) is trying to sell it, and Neil (Joseph Clowser), callow and dyspeptic, turns up for a viewing, hoping to buy it for his dissatisfied, heavy drinker of a wife, Pam (Helen Phillips). Dennis is every bit the shifty secondhand car salesman in this opening scene, while his nervy wife, Vera (Holly Smith), and battleaxe mother, Marjorie (Connie Walker), make cups of tea around the men.
