This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly how an Alan Ayckbourn play should be done!

London Classic Theatre have brought just about the darkest play he ever wrote to the New Vic for a week - and a packed first night audience loved it.

It's dark, yes, but also painfully funny. When Ayckbourn delivered the original script to the various  actors' lodgings in 1976 (at 4 o'clock in the morning, as usual) he included a cover note: “This play has turned out much darker than expected, gone in a completely different direction, but I hope you enjoy it.”

Written at the beginning of the prolonged peak of his powers, when the wild winter waves were pounding the Scarborough sea defences, Just Between Ourselves appears, at first, to be a simple suburban comedy. The centre piece is a bright green second-hand mini and Ayckbourn is clearly enjoying “have a go” at cars; from mechanical failures to analogies about “cross roads” in life. But the play soon reveals itself to be a much more about how desperate unhappiness drives people mad; and how devastating negative onslaughts can be.

The action spans four birthdays across a year - beginning and ending in deep winter. So the play begins and ends bleakly but it rises to a hilarious comedy of crisis which, at the New Vic, earned the regular Ayckbourn audience “Roar”. Indeed, throughout the play the audience's emotions are managed perfectly by director Michael Cadman and his absolutely superb cast of five

Dennis (played with just a touch of Eric Idle by Tom Richardson) inhabits his workshop garage, hopelessly failing to fix everything and anything, including his own life. His fixed-smile, put-upon wife Vera (Holly Smith), is feeling hopelessly marginalised and in need of emotional support from a husband who is simply too shallow to provide it.

To make matters worse, she is constantly in the company of Dennis's batty mother - a wonderful comedy character (somewhere on the Ena Sharples/Thora Hird spectrum) brought outrageously to life by Connie Walker. Ayckbourn himself had a partner and mother skirmishing over him, so the line, “It's always difficult to please two women at the same time” never rang more true.

Into this scenario stumbles the deeply unconfident and vaguely suicidal Neil (Joseph Clowser) who is thinking of buying Dennis's car for his wife Pam. We later learn this is a largely futile gesture to save their marriage, because Pam doesn't want it. Helen Phillips paints Pam as almost normal at first. But she has already peaked in her career as a 'supervisor' and is succumbing to a washed-out future.

The car is so central to the storyline that Just Between Ourselves is often referred to as 'the Morris Minor play” although in this case it's a Mini!  In many of Ayckbourn's plays there is an oblivious, unknowing human character around which everyone else goes to pieces. The genius of this play is that it's the inanimate car that is the innocent party that finds itself the centre of the chaos.

Within this highly comedic set-up, Ayckbourn embarks on a deep exploration of failing mental health. He's on a tightrope. Mental illness is never funny; but his audiences expect him to be funny. The fact that he squares this circle with complete compassion is his personal triumph, and the fact that the London Classic cast and director pull it off so perfectly, is theirs. The characters he draws - and which they assume - are amongst the most memorable in his repertoire.

The production is at Newcastle-under-Lyme this week and continues around the country until mid-July. It's well worth a very long car journey to see it.

Five stars.

Reviewed by Chris Eldon-Lee at the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme where the production continues to show until Saturday 3 May.