Show & Tell review – Ayckbourn’s latter-day Lear blusters around the front room

If, like Alan Ayckbourn , you had 89 plays under your belt, what would your worst nightmare be? Could anything be scarier than reaching your 90th only to find no audience left to watch it? Worse, what if the few who did pay attention found it irrelevant? What if it seemed like a relic from another era, as dated as a polemical 1960s drama from Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 or a sexist French farce from the days of weekly rep?

That 90th play is Show & Tell and although its principal character, Jack, is a retired managing director of a department store, he carries something of the impotent fury of King Lear, if not the fading magic of Prospero. Played by Bill Champion with a mix of suaveness, bluster and dementia-related violence, he is a king without a domain, as ineffectual as a playwright without a theatre.

In a gesture as romantic as it is delusional, Jack books the Homelight theatre company to perform a “sprightly comedy” called A Friend Indeed in his house as a birthday surprise for his wife. It becomes apparent, however, that the guests – wife, family, former heads of department – are figments of his imagination. A light domestic comedy about the misunderstandings of a doddery old man starts to turn into an absurdist drama in the style of Ionesco’s The Chairs .

The itinerant players whose performance of A Friend Indeed takes up the entire fourth act (just because Ayckbourn can) are not six characters in search of an author, but three actors in search of an audience.

In a play where everything is performative, the infidelities of French farce mirror the more truthful failings of Jack’s marriage. The owner whose slogan was “you matter” treated his staff with the same contempt as he did the wife he claims to dote on. Meanwhile, his former colleague Ben (a stand-out performance by Paul Kemp) is a chameleon with an actor’s instinct never to be the man you think he is.

As a play, it is slow burning, inconsistently funny and unresolved, but it is also strange and haunting; a compromise, as one of the actors puts it, between “something they quite enjoy” and “something you’re reasonably proud of”.

• At Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough , until 5 October. At Old Laundry theatre, Bowness-on-Windermere , 8–12 October