Bedroom Farce
****

Miss Julie
***

It's heartening, at last, to see the financially precarious Rose in full bloom as a producing house. Equipped with a sparky ensemble of eight actors, it presents a two-month, two-play repertory season, and has a real hit on its hands with Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce.

The set-up of this 1976 comedy is delicious both in its simplicity and its scope for spiralling chaos. On a single set sit three double beds, in and around which four couples, including the volatile pairing of Trevor and Susannah, manoeuvre. This imploding marriage ensures that no one gets much sleep during the single night of the play’s action.

Helped in no small measure by last year’s terrific Old Vic revival of The Norman Conquests, Ayckbourn has been undergoing a much-needed re-evaluation of late. This perky production from the indefatigable Peter Hall reminds us how much truth about often quietly desperate, sexually flailing, suburban middle-class lives the playwright packs in among the plentiful laughs.

There’s a strong turn from Finty Williams as a party hostess who ends up naked in a bed piled high with her guests’ coats, and particularly cherishable work from Jane Asher and the delightfully bluff Nicholas Le Prevost as a gently querulous long-married pair. Their no-nonsense domestic routines, splendid to observe, lend their bedroom the curious suggestion of boarding school dormitories from a long-ago youth.

There’s no mistaking the crackle of sexual and class tension between lady of the house Miss Julie (Rachel Pickup) and her father’s socially aspirational manservant Jean (Daniel Betts, cruelly cool and impressive) over the course of another sleepless theatrical night, this time during the upside-down mayhem of a Midsummer Eve in late 19th-century Sweden. Courtesy of a graphic bed-centred mime, director Stephen Unwin makes sure we understand that it wasn’t the crossword the pair were doing when they slipped away together. Still, there’s the customary problem with Strindberg’s script, namely the whirligig of hysteria that the pair work themselves into, which precludes all rational thinking, as well as my patience and sympathy.
Until 28 November (0871 230 1552, www.rosetheatrekingston.org).