A student edition of five one-act plays by Britain's most popular playwright. Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form Dominic Dromgoole