A clever award-winning play by a clever author (Michael Frayn) Benefactors is 30 years old, but asks questions as relevant now as they were in 1960 where the play is set.

If it has a message, it is don’t ask questions about why your closest friends behave as they do – and don’t offer to help. They can manage their own successes and failures no matter how unlikely that looks.

Two middle class socially aware couples, an architect and his anthropologist wife (Jeremy Crow and Carrie Lambe) tangle with a journalist and his partner (Steven Adams and Jen Ley.)

All four are excellently cast and play with an easy confidence that immediately recommends them to their audience. You trust them on sight.

Though a comedy, the play is not an “easy laugh.” The underlying destructiveness is real - the architect’s high rise buildings don’t get built, the journalist’s political ambition doesn’t get him very far, and family lives wither through neglect.

This is director Tess Gill’s first production for the company. She has created two absorbing hours in the theatre and the show is well worth seeing for the sheer good quality she has given it.