Season's Greetings - Review

Mr. Ayckbourn is a keen student of family life in the suburbs. His plays generally take place within the walls of modest, self-consciously gracious homes, the kind that make ideal settings for a sitcom. And Mr. Ayckbourn can be very funny. But then he has this habit of, without warning, becoming sour, if not downright menacing. His amusing people suddenly turn pathetic or nasty, just like in real life. Americans, evidently, find these transitions jarring. The British apparently feel right at home.
''Season's Greetings,'' produced by Shaun Sutton for the BBC, begins on Christmas Eve and ends on Dec. 27, the morning after Boxing Day. The home belongs to Neville and Belinda, who have been married for eight and a half years and have already reached the stage of wondering if they can possibly spend the rest of their lives as good friends. Neville is a successful retailer who seemingly prefers to spend most of his time with Eddie, his old boyhood chum, who is married to Pattie, who is pregnant again and not very happy about it. Both couples have children who, although the supposed beneficiaries of the Christmas exertions, are never seen.
Also visiting for the holidays are: Bernard, a wimpish doctor who, with good reason, has concluded that he is a failure in life; his wife Phyllis, a rather dotty tippler who traditionally cooks a leg of lamb that is universally loathed and Uncle Harvey, a security expert partial to violent television shows (''You just missed a damn fine shark fight, you lot''). Finally there is Rachel, a sensitive, repressed virgin at age 38. She has invited Clive, a youngish novelist, as her guest for the occasion, and he becomes the plot catalyst as Rachel, Belinda and Phyllis vie for his attention. Everybody in place, the wheels start spinning furiously.
Mr. Ayckbourn prefers working on the periphery of things. Key scenes are always taking place off stage or between the acts. Throughout the first scene, we keep getting reports of Phyllis's apparently disastrous progress in the kitchen with the leg of lamb. There has been an accident with a can of flour and some mention of a nosebleed. Neville tells his wife that he has just seen Phyllis sprawled on the kitchen table with ''three yards of kitchen towel stuffed up her nose.'' But Phyllis doesn't actually appear until the very end of the scene and the dinner itself is skipped over completely. The second scene simply begins with several disparaging references to the lamb.
So too, there is Bernard preparing his annual puppet show that invariably leaves both children and adults monumentally bored. This year, it's ''The Three Little Pigs'' and the audience is fervently hoping that it won't be as interminable as last year's ''Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.'' We do get to see part of the rehearsal, complete with its confusion about which pig is which, but the show itself is, no doubt mercifully, left to our imagination. Meanwhile, old Uncle Harvey is slowly making a transition from seemingly harmless old bully to someone decidedly more nasty and sinister.
As Mr. Ayckbourn's characters circle each other, sometimes warily, sometimes with undisguised contempt, there is little room for consoling compassion. The most that can be expected to help cope with life's endless absurdities is a determination to see our gloriously puny selves clearly. Directed by Michael Simpson, a British cast provides several outstanding performances: Anna Massey as Rachel, Bridget Turner as Phyllis, Geoffrey Palmer as Bernard, Barbara Flynn as Belinda, Nicky Henson as Neville, and Shawn Scott as Clive. While not as successful as the wonderful version of Mr. Ayckbourn's ''The Norman Conquests'' that was done for television several years ago, ''Season's Greetings'' is an effective demonstration of a gifted playwright at work.