Alan Ayckbourn has a question for you

There, he hilariously detonated mayhem to expose the evil that simmers within soft-furnished suburban sitting rooms. Here, in Earth Angel (his 91st play, give or take an unperformed one or two), Ayckbourn unfolds the action more sedately, carefully constructing his drama around an implied question: how to respond when confronted with genuine goodness?

I doubt that the change of pace has anything to do with the passage of years. It’s more to do with the playwright’s commitment to a particular style of theatre in which action is based on choices presented to and made by the characters and where – crucially – the audience becomes implicated via imaginative participation.

Neighbourhood Watch, fast-paced and over the top, let us off the hook: we would never behave like that. Earth Angel, still funny, still showing up ridiculous behaviour, leaves us wriggling.

Kevin Jenkins’s realistic set – kitchen, sitting room, hallway, front door (with walls reduced to 2ft cutaways) locates us firmly in contemporary suburbia. Norah washes dishes at the sink; Daniel dries. They discuss the eulogy just heard. Norah agrees with the vicar, Amy was an “Earth angel”.

Norah (Elizabeth Boag) is the last of the mourners, a neighbour there to help new widower Gerald (Russell Richardson). But who is Daniel (Iskandar Eaton)? He says he didn’t know Amy. He doesn’t know Gerald either, but the retired school teacher, believing the young man’s self-proclaimed mission of kindness, invites him to stay.

An internet-obsessed neighbour  (Hayden Wood) escalates Norah’s suspicions and fans the fury of Gerald’s magistrate sister (Liza Goddard) and her retired police officer husband (Stuart Fox – part of a fine ensemble neatly directed by Ayckbourn himself). The situation escalates. The ending surprises. We are left with the question we have come to expect of an Ayckbourn play: what would we have done?

Earth Angel is at the Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, until 11 October

Photograph by Tony Bartholomew