A blissful Frayn reunion

I found myself overwhelmed with amusement when Michael Frayn's thirty-year-old farcical comedy about a Cambridge college reunion hit the heights of comic invention and remained there for several vintage, blissful minutes.

Shedding her inhibitions and her spectacles, Samantha Bond's Lady Driver, the sexually repressed, mid-forties wife of the Master of the college, emerges from hiding and the bedroom she believes has been taken over for the reunion Saturday by the lost love of her own college days, one R R Moore.

Since Moore has failed to arrive the room has been taken by aggressively boring K Snell, a bearded obsessive dealing in pharmaceuticals and parastic infestation, played by Mark Addy, whom all the other graduates have forgotten.

In classic farcical form identities are mistaken. Snell stands speechless as the Master's wife pours out her famished heart. "You seem to have changed completely," she finally complains as the disappointing truth dawns.

Before there is time for her undignified exit, the appearance of drunken reunion graduates forces her into that position beloved of farceurs - desperate attempts at hiding to save her reputation and heighten our pleasure.

This scene captures the delicious essence of the first half of Donkeys' Years, in which Frayn deftly trades in the currency of elitist, middle-class situation comedy, with sex and alcohol fuelling the sophisticated fun.

In the far shorter second act Frayn turns his hand and inventive mind to the traditional English farce of desperation he adores, and which leaves me fairly cool. I prefer rather more of the cold douche of reality than Frayn or farce usually permits.

Industrial action - that Seventies speciality - causes a lock-in at the college. Trousers innocently fall and remain fallen. A government minister fears for his sexual reputation. A hypodermic syringe is plunged into several bodies. Lady Driver's clothes and shoes appear borrowed for transvestite reasons.

There is no missing the ingenuity with which Donkeys' Years brings on the catastrophes, but there comes to be something mechanical and contrived about the pile-up of apparently damaged reputations.

Jeremy Sams's production, with Michael Simkins's bellowing surgeon and Jonathan Coy's downmarket author lacking in vitality, works best before the shift to farce.