THIS is a story of swans and prawns, and the primal animal in us all.

In the natural world as studied by anthropologist John Godber, the swans are A and B social groups gathered for the black-tie charity bash at Bagley Hall Hotel, ostensibly to raise funds for a heart scanner but in reality to raise their local profile in the bored, company of their trophy wives.

The mayor, chief inspector and guest-speaking author Graham Beston (Dicken Ashworth) are attending, so too the lawyers, the property speculators, and the businessmen, the stuff of social diaries in Yorkshire Life magazine.

On the surface, they are all grace and calm, but beneath, they are paddling frantically, trying to outdo each other.

The ego is big, the talk is small, and in this male-dominated hotbed of power games no-one says what he really thinks for fear of losing his place in the food chain.

Further down that chain are the prawns, picking up the detritus on the sea bed. "We are prawns in the game of life," moan Ronnie (Ashworth) and Keith (Robert Angell), the hotel's lugubrious night porters left to clear up the mess and prick the party balloons in the Balmoral Suite.

In part inspired by Alan Ayckbourn's House & Garden (two plays, two auditoriums, performed simultaneously with only one cast), Godber has composed Black Tie And Tales as the sister piece to Screaming Blue Murder, his first, critically-murdered, venture into thrillers.

Set in the same hotel and played by the same repertory cast, Black Tie And Tales makes regular references to the murder, but that is a (distracting) sub-plot in a return to Godber's roots in a no-nonsense, social comedy for the party season, as the Hull Truck writer-director observes the British at play once more.

Dinner jackets are back, moved up the pecking order from the doormen of Bouncers to the local glitterati.

As with Bouncers, a cast of four (a slightly hesitant Ashworth, Angell, Amy Thompson and Fiona Wass) play 20 to 30 roles between them.

The world is refracted through Ronnie and Keith, Godber's messengers on stage - along with equally trenchant speaker Beston - and they are the equivalent of Shakespeare's Fools, outwardly daft, but scoring points through social comment.

"Going nowhere fast" they are, like Vladimir and Estregon in Waiting For Godot, with shades of the crossfire between Lucky Eric and Judd in Bouncers and Alas Smith & Jones too.

All around them is stilted caricature, Godber going for the easy them-and-us comedy option.

For all the use of rhyming couplets, We're still Waiting For Godber to find his mature voice beyond the ruddy, acerbic humour.

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Updated: 10:04 Tuesday, December 16, 2003