ONE of the joys of Scarborough's glorious summers is Alan Ayckbourn's revivals of his myriad works. He has so many to his now knighted name – Hero's Welcome later this season will be his 79th – that it can take an age to revisit even a favourite.

Ayckbourn refers to his 1974 play Confusions as a stepping stone, from the situation comedy of How The Other Half Loves to the darker comic arts of Absent Friends. He has not staged it since its premiere at the SJT's first home in the Library, when he was seeking to both extend the SJT's season and show off his actors' diversity in his nascent days as artistic director.

He has a fondness for a formative work that has been performed regularly elsewhere and now receives a hero's welcome of its own at the heart of this week's birthday celebrations for the SJT's 60th anniversary and Ayckbourn's central role in so many of those years.

Don't be confused but Confusions is not so much one play as five one-act plays within one play (facilitating Ayckbourn's desire to give free rein to his actors' talents in multiple roles).

York Press:

Emma Manton's Rosemary, left, and Elizabeth Boag's Lucy in Mother Figure in Confusions. Picture:Tony Bartholomew

Each vignette has its own theatrical style or a comic device on which the humour is founded; the first, for example, is built around a devoted but exhausted young mother, Lucy (Elizabeth Boag), in Mother Figure. She is so isolated and housebound that when her concerned neighbours (Emma Manton's timid Rosemary and Stephen Billington's domineering Terry) pay an uninvited visit, she treats them as if they were children. Darkness creeps around the edges of this otherwise hilarious scenario.

Each play has a link of sorts to the next (until the stand-alone finale), and so we encounter Lucy's unfaithful travelling-salesman husband Harry (Richard Stacey) as he tries out his sales patter, drink by drink, line by spun line, to entice fellow guest Paula (Manton) into Room 249 of one of those ghastly, anonymous northern hotels of the Seventies.

Enter her work colleague Bernice (Boag) and Harry will spread his excruciating chat-up technique like the thickest butter, as Stacey gives a masterclass in the very difficult art of playing a boorish man becoming drunk. The skill, as Berwick Kaler once explained, is to convey the desperate attempt to come across as sober when the evidence is otherwise.

Billington's discreet waiter from Drinking Companion, Walter, moves centre stage for Between Mouthfuls, for which Ayckbourn came up with the brilliantly comic idea of the waiter moving in and out of listening range of two increasingly fraught conversations between husband-and-wife diners at separate tables.

York Press:

Elizabeth Boag as Mrs Pearce, Stephen Billington as the Waiter and Russell Dixon as Mr Pearce in Between Mouthfuls in Confusions. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

They turn out to have a shared secret, and as Walter goes about his duties as if nothing untoward is happening, Billington's poker face is comedic minimalism at its best, while Russell Dixon's irascible diner, business boss Mr Pearce, would turn restaurateurs up and down the land ashen.

His exasperated wife (Boag) pops up again in a glorious slice of vintage farce, Gosforth's Fete, where she is the subject of assorted mishaps as the overbearing organiser (Dixon) spreads mayhem, whatever, whoever, he touches. A fete worse than death? Well, it is certainly far funnier, not least Stacey's well-meaning but hapless Vicar.

After this manic high point, Ayckbourn applies a clever mathematical exercise as a coda in which five into four won't go in A Talk In The Park. Four people are minding their own business, each on a separate bench, when a fifth arrives, takes a seat and starts an unwanted conversation, setting in motion a chain of reaction.

All five plays are a delight, individually and collectively, and writer-director Ayckbourn has picked a particularly wonderful cast to maximise the twists and turns, surprises and inevitabilities of his splendid revival. You will laugh from start to finish, so book now for Confusions: it makes perfect sense.

Confusions, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, on various dates until September 26. Box office: 01723 370541 or at sjt.uk.com