How terribly English

New playwright Steven Moffat may be the natural successor to Alan Ayckbourn and Anupama Chandrasekhar's work sheds light on Gandhi's assassin

- Michael Billington

WE are sorely in need of laughter in these troubled W times and I have no hesitation in saying that The Unfriend by Steven Moffat at Chichester's Minerva Theatre is the funniest new play by a British dramatist since Alan Ayckbourn was at his peak. Moffat comes to the theatre from a successful television career in which he wrote numerous episodes of Doctor Who and Sherlock. Even if this is his debut play, he shows a genuine gift for exploring the comic possibilities of embarrassment.

The play's premise is simple. Peter and Debbie, an English suburban couple, meet Elsa, an unquenchable American gusher, on a cruise. Elsa insists that, if ever they are in Denver, they look her up: she also persuades Peter and Debbie to give her their email address. A brief encounter turns into a living nightmare when the formidable Elsa turns up at their Chiswick home. They check out their much-widowed guest on the internet, only to discover that she is rumoured to be a practised poisoner.

To say more would be to spoil the fun, but what Mr. Moffat exploits is the difficulty of getting rid of an unwanted house guest. You could say that the play has echoes of an American work such as Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came To Dinner and even of a Swiss piece, Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers, in which a pair of arsonists insinuate themselves into a family home. I was struck, however, by the deep Englishness of Mr. Moffat's play, in that it shows our endless capacity for evasion. Nowhere is that more evident than in the superb performance of Reece Shearsmith as the Pooterish Peter.