Never, ever go to a country house for the weekend. You are sure to end up either dead, interrogated by Hercule Poirot or creeping around the shrubbery with your trousers round your ankles. The venue’s literary reputation goes before it and it is partly this potential for compromise that Alan Ayckbourn plays with in The Norman Conquests. There is a puckish sense of mischief driving this ingenious trilogy, here receiving its first London outing for 34 years.

The joke is that nothing happens – nobody dies and, in spite of his best efforts, Norman only manages to sleep with his own wife. But it is in those unfulfilled longings that the pain as well as the comedy lies. And Matthew Warchus’s magnificent revival demonstrates that in Ayckbourn’s hands comedy can be every bit as devastating and relentless as Greek tragedy. His production is often gloriously funny, but the desolation that seeps out over the course of the three plays is heart-rending.