THE six actors who opened the Stephen Joseph Theatre summer season in one Alan Ayckbourn premiere close the Scarborough summer back where they started: the same six in another Ayckbourn premiere, having learned more about each other and themselves.

This symmetry is reprised by the characters in Private Fears In Public Places: six self-contained, insular, stymied lives end back where they began. Each is still in search of a move upwards and onwards, some of them are no happier, shackled by past or present circumstance.

Ayckbourn says the theme of his grave, emotionally-knotted play is the knock-on effect that our individual actions have upon another person, sometimes a complete stranger.

"We may not even be aware of this," he says. "Nonetheless, we are all of us linked; we are all related. And whether we like it or not, none of us can truly stand alone or indeed remain aloof or immune."

He sets the play in London, the metropolis where loneliness can feel heightened, as the dodgem cars on life's highway go about their speeding business all around you. Together with designer Pip Leckenby, he presents five initially lifeless settings; a sofa and table; an office desk and chair; an hotel bar and two chairs; and two sets of table and chairs (one of which will double as a flat and bar). Some are private, others are public, and fears will be exposed in all of them.

Stewart (Paul Kemp) is a couch-potato estate agent, stuck on pre-cooked TV dinners and struck on the lithe receptionist, Charlotte (Billie-Claire Wright), at his office. He may deal in moving for a living but he frets over making a move on her.

His sense of inadequacy is palpable, and his sister, Imogen (Sarah Moyle), is no more self-confident, for all her pretence of meeting up with the girls for a drink each evening she leaves their shared flat.

Charlotte, a practising Christian with an alarming smile, is a strange one: her overbearing relationship with God and the Bible has her looking after the curmudgeonly, bedridden father of barman Ambrose (Adrian McLoughlin) each night, yet she delights in sexually taunting Stewart with home-made porn videos. Whether others are dysfunctional, she is malfunctioning.

Repressed gay barman Ambrose, once dominated by his mother, now tied to his Alf Garnett father, spends his day half-listening to the rambling thoughts of Dan (Stephen Beckett). Discharged without honour from his father's beloved Army, Dan is at a loss what to do next beyond ordering the next drink. He and his brusque Sloane Street fiance (Melanie Gutteridge) have lost interest in each other.

This is a slow-burning psycho-drama, with no interval to interrupt the flow, and the comedy is discomfiting, the characters empathetic, and the playing of Beckett and Moyle particularly good.

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Updated: 11:24 Wednesday, August 18, 2004