Alan Ayckbourn is a practitioner of “theatrical amusement” as well as a refined experimentalist: his plays present the most unexpected combinations, thus expanding our range of expectations. Bourgeois marriage, adultery, class conflicts and small obsessions are some of the themes at play in Comédia de Bastidores [Absurd Person Singular] (1972), a major instance of that ambiguous tone that someone once described as “painfully funny”. Split into three acts, each of which takes place on three consecutive (and not festive at all) Christmas celebrations, Comédia de Bastidores is a merciless, and yet tender, depiction of social climbing, which has been seen by some as a premonition of the kind of society that would flourish under Margaret Thatcher’s rule.