Elephants

This is probably the best value entertainment you will get all year. And here we are mid-January and already you have missed it.

Of course there are two sides to good value. One is cost, and here we had the ultimate bargain. £12 for best seats in the house. The other is product and this was an excellent product. Had my favourite combination of lots of laughs and some rather harrowing drama too. And you could tell how good it is in that the audience included Juliet Stephenson (which I only noticed because the lady next to me pointed her out and said she knew she was a famous actress but couldn't remember her name.)

The plot couldn't sound less amusing. Christmas Eve and a middle-aged couple are gathering together friends and family for Christmas. These consist of their teenage daughter (who it soon transpires has been in an expensive mental health clinic) another middle-class, middle-aged couple, and a girl of mixed race from Peckham who had been taken in by the family as a youngster through some nice middle-class charity for the disadvantaged. And had been the girlfriend of their son. Whose absence is the elephant in the room, having been stabbed to death in the street the previous year.

Not a traditional back-drop to humour, but in fact it is the basis for it. After all, can you imagine a more awkward way of spending Christmas than with that lot? (Add dad over-drinking, and the nutter daughter hating the ex-girlfriend. And mother trying to confront the "elephant" upfront, by all holding hands, or reading out poetry she had commissioned for her deceased son.)

The star role is the un-PC husband of the visitors. At one point in a heated conversation he is accused of being racist and goes off to the side in a sulk. Then as the heated conversation has gone on but there is a break, he suddenly says "Seven". Everyone is puzzled. "The number of black people I have been friends, or at least nodding terms with. And several homosexuals. And at least 3 bisexuals, and that must be more than the national average."

In another scene the daughter assures the black girl that he isn't really that bad now. His wife makes him read the Guardian every morning. Stands over him pointing out articles that would be improving.

The cast is very high quality, including Helen Atkinson Wood and Imogen Stubbs, and the set, in such a tiny space, is brilliant in concept. An absolute winner and a triumphal antidote to Christmas festivities. At least one will never have a Christmas that bad!