IMAGINE the worst school reunion party, but even worse still, in Torben Betts's fifth commission for his Scarborough mentor Alan Ayckbourn.

Betts is torn between writing "the mad stuff" that has caught on in America and the social-realist dramas that first announced his talent. In a nutshell, Howard Barker is clashing with Mike Leigh, and Barker is beginning to win out.

On the surface - and it is a flat surface on the McCarthy's slim end-on stage - The Swing Of Things is a routine kitchen-sink drama but, in keeping with Henry Ford's cars, Betts will write in any colour as long as it is black. "I take Ruth's despair and throw her over the cliff," he says. Ruthless indeed.

Ruth (Patti Clare) is as much out of love with conventional life as Betts. "Never in the swing of things", unkempt and lonely and newly made redundant from her teaching job, she has taken root like the overgrown garden in her pebble-dashed corner house where she grew up.

She invites two old school "friends": mother-of-three Lindsay (Cate Hamer), whose confidence has been shot to pieces by her boozy, jealous, failed-footballer husband, Mark (Neale Barry); and the haughty, high-flying fashion designer Caroline (Vivien Parry), who arrives with Claude (David Ajala), a £15 million French international Chelsea striker, on her immaculately dressed arm. Let battle commence.

This is dark comedy, not so much of discomfort but of embarrassment, and you could watch through a grill of fingers hiding your face. If you feel awkward, you are not alone. So too does Ruth's neighbour, Steve (Mark Spalding), a quiet, stammering, Gulf War veteran, whose every word is trampled into the ground by the stampede of opinions around him.

Indeed, often no-one is listening amid the Babel around them. Conversations in Adam Barnard's linear production criss-cross the stage, one conversation in the house, another in the garden, the audience sometimes ahead but at other times caught in the crossfire.

Everyone, audience and fine cast alike, emerges punch-drunk from the pulverising, unforgiving dialogue and the high-farce finale does not leaven the pain of what has gone before. Betts is mad at the world, its materialism and shallow fashions, and while it is equally hard to love his brittle, bashing play, it just might push you over the edge into craving an alternative life. Job done.

  • The Swing Of Things, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until October 27. Box office: 01723 370541