This week Oxford Playhouse hosts Lindsay Posner’s inspired revival of Mike Leigh’s 1977 sympotic musing on marriage, debauchery and the middle class.

Leigh brings the audience, invited along with the other guests, into the living room of Beverly and her nasal-voiced estate agent husband Laurence, a paisley-printed surburbian nightmare where apparently the peak of tragedy is a headboard being delivered sans bed. Hannah Waterman gives an energised performance as the vampish hostess, strutting self-possessedly across the stage, arranging the vol-au-vents just so before new neighbours Tony and Angela arrive. Sue arrives late, seeking sanctuary from the revelries of her pink-haired punk of a daughter’s party over at Number 9. Abigail’s party would have perhaps been the more sober choice; pretence of polite society soon collapses under an avalanche of Bacardi, olives and cheese squares.

Of the assembled adults, quietly thuggish Tony (Samuel James) and his harassed wife Angela (Katie Lightfoot) are perhaps the more intriguing. Tony’s monosyllabic dead pan is a neat balance to Beverly’s broader comedy and Lightfoot’s ‘Ange’, sitting passively as she is topped up with gin and instructed in the finer points of lipstick application, swings hilariously between wide-eyed, childlike vacuity and gross impropriety. It’s just the worst thing, she adds at one point, ‘vomitting in front of blokes’.

Battles rage, with passive aggression being the weapon of choice. Some of the references, it should be said, are as gloriously dated as the fibre glass lamp but most (which is classier - Sainsbury’s or Co-op?) are transparent enough for anyone to understand. Anyone other than Angela that is.

Lines are finally drawn over a question of taste; Laurence nasally dismissing his wife’s music choice as ‘fat Greek caterwauling’ and her art as ‘porn’. As Demis Roussos plays on the record player, ex-footballer Tony leaps hungrily into his dancing hostess’s arms. Laurence’s only recourse is to thrust his book collection beneath Sue’s startled nose - Dickens and Shakespeare, gold-plated but, he points out, ‘not something you’d actually read’.

We are reminded of Abigail’s revelries sporadically; thumping music, teenage squealing, even the occasional anecdote manages to be heard over the ‘grown-up’ squabbling of Number 13. And as the play twirls to its heady conclusion, the quintet's carefully crafted domesticity disintegrates utterly to the strains of Beethoven's fifth - with the volume turned down of course (wouldn't want to upset the neighbours now, would we?).