There is a real period feel in director Michael Cabot’s production of Ayckbourn’s social satire from 1976, but it does not make for a jolly night out for those expecting the playwright’s more customary jack-a-napes comedy.
Some decades earlier, Somerset Maugham made his living from acute observation of unhappy marriages among the upper middle class, just as Ayckbourn turned a penetrating eye on the fallibilities of those a couple of social degrees lower, especially as they affected his long-suffering women. It is in Just Between Ourselves that what he sees finds its bleakest expression.
In all these seemingly normal families, there runs an undercurrent of tension and unhappiness, and from the opening moment here when Dennis lets slip that his wife Vera is constantly smashing things "caught by her elbow", we know that it is not only the crockery that is fragile in this household.
The story tracks their birthday celebrations, as well as those of Neil and Pam, whom they first meet when they arrive to buy Vera’s car, and that of Dennis’s crotchety and critical mother Marjorie. Along the way, marital secrets are shared, ‘just between ourselves’ and suffice it to say that the festivities do not end with a bang but a thunderous whimper.
The piece is carried along by Tom Richardson as Dennis, a man of instantly depressive joviality and utter insensitivity, whose constant jokey belittling of Holly Smith’s Vera has destroyed whatever little confidence she had, leading to mental breakdown. The one beam of light in his character is when Dennis, disorganised, having neglected fixing the garage doors for months, recalls with affection the gifts that his handyman father made for him each birthday, including a carousel with moving horses. This happy memory is one of the saddest moments in the play.
Joseph Clowser’s Neil matches Dennis’s practical shortcomings with his own emotional ones. "People get demagnetised after a bit," he says of the deterioration of his relations with Pam. "Women need a rock; I’m a marshmallow."
Helen Phillips is a feisty Pam, the only one of the five likely to break free from this sticky morass of frustrated desires, while Connie Walker as Marjorie exerts a debilitating influence from the sidelines.
The set, built around Vera’s old mini in Dennis’s garage, will work better on a smaller stage than Malvern’s Festival Theatre, and the prominence of the workbench made it impossible from the right-hand side of the stalls to make out what was going on, if anything, at a critical moment between Dennis and Pam in the front seats of the car.
The production continues its 2025 UK tour to Basingstoke, Windsor, Darlington, London, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Bath, Derby, Lancaster, Harrogate, Bury St Edmunds, Perth, Doncaster, Southport, Bromley, Taunton, Cardiff and Cheltenham until July 12.