Trouble is brewing
Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends invites you to the world’s most excruciating cup of tea. Colin is coming round: cheerful, well-meaning Colin, whose fiancée drowned a few weeks ago, and his old friends have gathered to comfort him. There’s just one problem. Everyone else’s lives are quietly falling apart, and Colin’s relentless positivity is the last thing any of them can handle.
What follows is a masterclass in suburban Scottish social discomfort: forced small talk, buried resentments, and the specific agony of pretending everything is fine while sipping tepid tea. Ayckbourn’s razor-sharp comedy peels away the polite surface of suburban friendship to reveal the loneliness, grief, and quiet desperation underneath.
First staged in 1974, Absent Friends is funny, painful, and painfully recognisable: a play about the terrifying distance between the person we imagine ourselves to be and the person we have become.
Awkward silences, misplaced sympathy, and one unforgettable Saturday afternoon. ?Pass the biscuits. Avoid eye contact.
