This is the author's 19th play. Quite a good life's work, you might think. Not for our favourite laughsmith, Sir Alan Ayckbourn. In fact it's an oeuvre de jeunesse', written in 1975, his first commission for the National Theatre, premiered of course in his base town of Scarborough, winner of the Tony Award for Best Play in 1978, subject of countless revivals. This one, at the Playhouse all week, comes from the Churchill Theatre, Bromley, directed by Robin Herford, himself a Scarborough veteran and best known as director of the 17-year run of the thriller The Woman in Black.

When you're talking about an Ayckbourn play, you always ask "Is that the one where . . . ?", because he unfailingly finds some unexpected setting - a boat, or a choir rehearsal, or interchangeable acts, or simultaneous staging for his people to perform their their manic or pompous antics. Here, it's three bedrooms - one on an upper level, decorously furnished with sheets and bedspread, two with not very pristine duvets.

The trad one, unsurprisingly, belongs to middle-aged Ernest and Delia (Colin Baker and Louise Jameson, both excellent), trying to celebrate a wedding anniversary, he with his mind on a leaky roof, she making do with pilchards on toast as a dorm feast. Another is occupied by Nick, smouldering darkly and groaning with a bad back (Timothy Watson does well with the long periods of immobility forced on him) and his flighty wife Jan (Hannah Yelland). The third belongs to Malcolm and Kate (James Midgley and Natalie Cassidy) and is mainly a coat store for the guests at their house-warming party.

Roaming about like a gangling accident-prone inarticulate agent of discord is Trevor (Ben Porter), while his wife Susannah (Beth Cordingly), half-hysterical and wholly self-absorbed, flits dangerously in and out of other people's lives. We don't see their bed and it's probably as well. Like Sheridan's She Stoops to Conquer, the play chronicles The Mistakes of a Night' as the ill-sorted octet meet and cross and squabble through the small hours. Much is made of the neatly planted props - coats and shoes, Nick's unread book, a Cornish pasty - and the endless struggles with bedclothes. Ayckbourn keeps the tension going and the laughs coming by having Malcolm doing battle with a flatpack surprise' he's bought for his wife, while she in her fluffy pink slippers is dimly trying to hint at other inadequacies.

The surprise' turns out to be a ghastly little table, which inevitably collapses at a touch from Tevor. But the equally fragile sex lives of the couples aren't exposed to any hard truths. They make do and mend and curl up in bed as usual, quite comfortably together. No questions asked. Or answered.