Comedy and desperation

With the ninth and final production in Chichester's 40th anniversary season now up and running, it is the moment for a little stocktaking. The shows in this celebratory year have been of mixed quality, with the good - The Front Page, The Lady's Not for Burning - mixed with the mediocre and the downright poor.

Theatre director Andrew Welch is now leaving after five years at the helm, to be replaced by a "triumvirate" including Steven Pimlott, formerly of the RSC. Long-term funding has been secured. Chichester's future prospects thus merit cautious optimism.

A positive note is similarly sounded by this neat take - fittingly directed by Loveday Ingram, one of the young artists Chichester has encouraged in recent years - on Terry Johnson's Nineties classic Dead Funny.

Set at the time of the deaths of Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd in 1992, it brutally dissects failing middle-class relationships, while all the time sheltering under a carapace of comedy.

Richard, Brian, Nick and Lisa are ardent members of the Dead Funny society, which meets regularly to reminisce about the greats of British light entertainment. Fittingly, in Tim Shortall's design, black and white photos of Williams, Hill, Hancock et al loom out at us from the back of the living-room set.

But as Richard's embittered wife Elly points out, they depend on comedy as their fix of escapism from the difficult issues of the real world.

"If it's something you can't snigger at, you run a mile," she says to her emotionally unresponsive husband.

Just like the comedians they so revere, these five characters struggle with deeply flawed personal lives. Abigail McKern's Elly is by turns fierce and tender as she tries, with increasing desperation, to coax Richard into impregnating her.

Adrian Lukis, a great success in The Front Page earlier this season, turns in another winning performance, filling his Richard with public bonhomie and private torment. Comedy, as any fule kno, is no laughing matter.

£ Until 5 October, Chichester Festival Theatre. Box office 01243 781312.

Dead Funny