I spent my formative theatre years watching or acting in bizarre little plays whose main virtue was that they were cheap to put on; it was only later I learnt they were part of an avant-garde movement called ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’. Anhouilh, Beckett, Ionesco, NF Simpson were names that spelled theatre to me – wordy, incomprehensible comedies satirising the domestic conformity of the middle classes. It came as a surprise when I moved south to discover that just as plays were not always staged in Co-op halls or giant folding caravans, actors could speak and behave on stage much they did in real life, with sets that resembled ordinary surroundings. Sadly, as the décor and dialogue became more realistic, much of the magic vanished. It was with a sense of pleasurable anticipation, then, that I settled onto a bench in a room above the Oxford Arms in Camden and looked at the set in front of me: four IKEA chairs, and a fireplace chalked on the back wall. I was not disappointed.

Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna begins and ends in a family sitting room where a middle class couple, the Smiths, talk of the very ‘English’ meal they have just consumed, to the monotonous sound of a chiming clock. Stage directions suggest the play should seem to begin all over again at the end, as if the characters are caught up in an endless loop of surreal behaviour. Superb ensemble playing and brisk direction, the keynotes of Etcetera Theatre’s production, sweep the audience along with the skewed events and banal yet contradictory characters as the Smiths are joined by a similarly odd couple and are surprised by a visit from a local fire chief. The play is a complex and unsettling mini-masterpiece, full of verbal surprises and changes of pace with an underlying sense of menace.

In the 1950s, the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, derived from post-war rootlessness, mocked bourgeois illusions of stability and obsession with routine. Humdrum characters with a tendency to explosive outbreaks foreshadowed Tony Hancock’s East Cheam rebel, John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, and Ricky Gervais’s office-bound clerks, inwardly seething individuals on the edge of revolt. In ‘The Bald Prima Donna’ excusing her husband’s outburst to their guests, a wife explains, ‘He can’t control himself when he’s bored stiff’.

Inspired by a text book from which the author learned English, the play is full of non-sequitors, pointless anecdotes, parroted ‘received wisdom’, and sudden incoherent rages which catch us by surprise. It seems slightly dated, but if the middle classes no longer employ maids and watch TV rather than practise embroidery the messages about the emotional price of ‘ordered’ existence and its precarious nature are as valid as ever. This is a highly commendable and thoroughly entertaining production of an important play in the genre of ‘ absurd theatre’.