[It would seem that in Joking Apart] beneath their outward charm and desire to help Richard and Anthea are monsters. They do not respect boundaries and without boundaries there may be prosperity but there will be moral chaos. Inexorably for all their good intentions they spread disaster around them. The author's serious exposure of their impact on others is so well covered by his comic strategies that you could sit through the whole play laughing your head off without realising that an acute moral assessment is being made. But even if we take the play at its surface value it must seem a remarkable piece of work. Do not be misled by those newspaper interviews in which Ayckbourn explains how much he dislikes the act of writing and how he steels himself to dashing off his annual play in a week or so. Here is the twenty-first work...