IF ever anything is calculated to make you avoid a return to your homeland, it is John McColl's Sandcastles On The Beach, the first of a double bill from the Hong Kong Players who manage all too successfully to conjure up how claustrophobic it is to be on the same continent as your family.
Butter has come to a secret arrangement with his smothering wife Marge - yes, just the sort of jolly suburban joke to keep you chuckling over the buttered scones for hours - about his terminal cancer.
Tony Penny stands out for underplaying a difficult role; Janet Davis is to be congratulated for making her strident character somehow lovable. As an elderly couple, they dodge death with a mind-numbing, much-loved routine of putting the milk bottles out for collection, believing what the tabloids write, remembering bin collection day, waiting for their son Weston (Alex Frankel) to come home with his captivating new wife, Trish (Juliet Bryant).
Like every normal, happy British young family, Trish and Weston have conveniently forgotten about the old folks and pop by after months of absence only to announce Trish's pregnancy, just months after their wedding. When they are finally told about Butter's cancer, there is a double shock in store: as Marge memorably tells them, 'there's no law that says you can't have your husband stuffed'. Sandcastles and its quotable quotes are a poignant reminder of a very British inability to deal with feelings, old age or death.
The night's second play, Anthony Booth's None The Wiser, has a gang of shoplifters (an excellent cast: Christine Baldwin, Juliet Bryant, Amanda Raine, Cath Willacy and Karina Wilson) posing as the Sisters of Benefaction and deals with such issues as the difficulties of explaining away a nun reeking of meths.
When stealing becomes a habit, it is difficult for the women to change their ways just because two supposedly genuine nuns (Kay Ross and a wonderfully over-the-top Lisa Li) come to the convent looking for a temporary home.
In this slick, assured comedy of errors and misunderstandings, the nuns try to convince each other that they are the real thing by doing good deeds. You know it can never last.
Tears And Laughter by the Hong Kong Players McAulay Studio, Arts Centre
