THE BEAUTY of enduring friendship permeates this captivating production of Ronald Harwood’s Quartet.

Three ageing former opera singers contemplate playing out their twilight years in a retirement home while wistfully recalling their past glories, when the appearance of fallen idol Jean sets the cat amongst the pigeons. The characters are warmly delineated, with Paul Nicholas delightful as lascivious lech Wilfred, playing some awkward, dated lines with utter candour, while Jeff Rawle, best known from Drop the Dead Donkey, ensures the irascible Reggie is wholly lovable.

Despite professing to enjoy the “falling away of petty ambitions”, whether he’s swearing at the nurse, composing aphorisms about art or sewing “Wilfred’s hump”, we sense there’s a reason for his rage at not getting marmalade at breakfast.

Wendi Peters plays Cecily for laughs, channelling Mollie Sugden and moving around the stage like Julie Walters’ ancient waitress in Acorn Antiques. Sue Holderness as Jean brings more than a touch of emotional fragility as she reflects on the disappearance of youth and popularity and struggles to come to terms with where she has ended up.

Reflections on ageing can often be a source of cheap laughs, but there’s a deep humanity in the humour here and the cast’s riffs on memory lapses, the consequences of physical decline and loss of sexual prowess are more poignant than frivolous. As old secrets surface and rivalries fall away, the four demonstrate that older people don’t just talk about “God and death” but also love and sex and life, and the depth of their friendship triggers revelations about their young selves.

There’s a glorious coming together in full costume for the grand finale of Guiseppe Verdi’s birthday concert – the quartet’s ingenious solution to performing the demanding Rigoletto for the rest of the “inmates” combines the past and present in a celebratory way that manages to gives us a glimpse of exactly the former glories they’ve hinted at.

Utterly charming.