Family Album is Alan Ayckbourn’s 87th play and one of his very, very best. It is an absolute masterpiece of character observation and theatrical construction.

Unsurprisingly, he returns to themes of human frailty and utilises stage-craft devices he has explored before but this time they are elasticated even more. For me, in Family Album, he finally achieves heavenly perfection.

His base line is that he is quarrying the emotional angst of moving house, and the inevitable bitter-sweet memories and family flashpoints such a stressful exercise always generates. But, by applying generational layers to the situation, he produces something so moving, it cradled my heart. And, typically of Ayckbourn, he litters the early lines with future clues. So there is great fun to be had in ‘spotting the set-ups’.

We see a room. Or, rather, we don’t see a room. It is just an empty stage with the estate agent’s outline of a lounge marked on the floor by a strip of neon light. Initially, this is blue; which we learn means that we are in that room in February 1952.

Young Peggy, played by Georgia Burnell with a 50’s film star hair do, steps into it with the words, “Hello house”. She and her regimented ex-RAF husband, John, (played by Anthony Eden) are moving in with their best carefully labelled furniture. He is engaged in the militarily planned operation of moving house. She wants to be more intuitive about where the Victorian heirlooms best belong.

They are in love, but they are entrenched in post-war life and their differences are loud and clear. In line with the male attitude of the day, he consigns her to the kitchen, where she can only produce spam fritters. Having won the war, John hasn’t quite accepted that, six years later, rationing is still in force. And being an un-reconstructed male, he still smacks his children and is damned if his daughter is going to university.

Leaping forward to 1992, the neon strip has turned yellow and that very same daughter, Sandra (played by Frances Marshall), having been denied an education, is struggling to cope with a failing marriage and an off-the-wall children’s party. Trapped in the very same house, she’s desperate to talk to someone (anyone) on her new cordless phone, but already in the 90s, the answer-machine rules. When she finally reaches her mother, we agonisingly realise, from just Sandra’s side of the conversation, that Peggy has early-stage dementia.  It’s one of Ayckbourn’s most sparingly poignant passages ever, followed by one of his longest silences. Both mother and daughter are victims of their times.

The neon line turns red and Ayckbourn sneaks yet another decade onto the stage. It’s November 2022 and time to move out. Alison (Elizabeth Boag) muses on the fact that she is sitting on the very Victorian sofa her grandmother was conceived upon. But she and the furniture have got to go. What would her granddad John make of her black wife Jess (Tanya-Loretta Dee) and their happiness together?

The audience giggles when the removal men appear again. To be honest, their silent ‘Brokers Men’ routine gets the best laughs, whilst Alison simply says, “Good bye house”.

I guess Family Album is technically a tragicomedy but it spans both genres with such sensitivity and subtlety you barely notice. Ayckbourn is making socio-political points about all the changes we’ve seen during the Queen’s reign and he’s writing with ultimate empathy. You really want to hug all his characters and assure them it really isn’t their fault. Previous generations inevitably cast the die for the next. We cannot choose when we are born and, yes, life does get too much at times.

As a regular theatre goer, I was thrilled by the cleverness of the play’s construction. Ayckbourn’s tried and tested device or having two time frames taking place in the same room at the same time is always fun to watch. Here he increases that to three and he has all the characters related to each other. His writing for women excels, and the power of having people talking about another character whilst she is actually in the room - but in a different decade - is beautifully overwhelming. This is a hugely satisfying play. It is not to be overlooked.     

Five stars

Reviewed by Chris Eldon Lee at New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme on Tuesday 11 October. Family Album continues to show at the venue until Sat 22 October.