In Round and Round the Garden writer Alan Ayckbourn takes on Oscar Wilde directly with a side thrust at Chekhov, set in the garden of a large English country house, reminiscent of Woolton Manor, and concerned with the amorous entanglements of two sisters and a sister-in-law.

In brief he puts up a good fight on both counts, but in the Upside Down production directed by Wendy Dunning-Baker at Bettembourg this week he failed to get enough support to claim victory.

Which was a pity since the individual actors all did very well by their characters, and the garden set was delightful, even if Oscar and the Prozorovs would have been somewhat disappointed with the 21st century idea of a large country house.

Question: do large country houses nowadays have a garden? Don’t they have gardens (or orchards)?

Not really an irrelevant question, since in many ways class and its 21st century alternative, age, are central to the problems with this production.

Let’s run through the parts: Annie is the unmarried and unfulfilled younger of two sisters; the next is sister Ruth, married to Norman, and then comes brother Reg, married to Sarah. And then there’s Tom who lives next door….

Basically therefore a nice tight family group of siblings.

And there’s the rub, for nice tight family groups, especially ones featuring mutual infidelity, usually have something in common, especially class and age.

Chekhov’s sisters start as explicitly 20, 25 and 28. As played here Annie (Emma Farrell) looks and behaves like the 20-year-old, but her sister Ruth (Niamh Huggard) is approaching Lady Bracknellhood. Sister-in-law Sarah (Fran Potasnik) falls agewise between the two but her husband Reg (Adrian Diffey) is more like Annie’s grandfather. Which leaves Norman (Darrell Perry), a decade or two younger than his wife, and Tom (Gav Guilfoyle) who is at least a suitable number of years older than Annie.

Culturally and educationally also this family was an excessively heterogenous group: it’s difficult to see the cut-glass voice of Ruth married to the brash vulgarity of Norman, or sister to Reg’s commonplace clichés.

Norman’s sexual appeal to this particular group of women, except perhaps Sarah, is also difficult to understand. Only Annie’s relationship with Tom denotes a potential marriage of two souls, albeit maladroit and inarticulate.

Which was all rather a pity because the individual performances, viewed one at a time, were all good, everyone being professionally audible and intelligible.

On the whole the laughter-making opportunities in the script were taken. Reg and Ruth had most of them, or at least seemed to, which may be an illusion created by greater skill in pointing a line: Norman was too fast for the audience on some, in particular the metaphysically thought-provoking reference to it ‘raining in Fulham – metaphorically’ but Tom made successful hay of his naiveté and lack of sensitivity to the aspirations of Annie, who is obviously destined to play the traditional role of the girl next door.

Each individual characterisation also made sense viewed apart.

Reg would have been a natural pouring the last of the summer wine: in the text he is supposed to play golf and still be an active estate agent, but he seemed unlikely to have much proficiency at either. His wife Sarah had a tougher job with less variety, but especially timed everything perfectly, displaying notable skill with tea-tray-dropping and agility diving into Norman’s embrace.

Norman has the disadvantage that his character is the least credible of the group, except possibly for Tom. He did brash and vulgar well, convincingly lost his temper with things inanimate (and vegetable), and generally managed to make himself the Ayckbourn character one would least like to meet.

His wife Ruth on the other hand did incisive and upper class superbly as she gave the impression of someone who might burgeon into Lady Bracknell at any time. In fact one wondered if at some point Norman might be discovered misbehaving with a handbag (actually here it was a suitcase, though occupied only by a pair of dangerously feral striped pyjamas).

That leaves the juvenile leads (as they are traditionally though inaccurately described) Annie and Tom.

Tom has the difficult job of making the woolly-headed vet next door convincingly fuddled and relationally locked into animals, to the extent of perhaps using Annie as an excuse to see her cat, instead of the other way around. (With some relief it does turn out that the cat is the excuse.)

Annie here was a perfect match, with just as little ability to communicate her emotions as Tom has. She played it very young so the naiveté even in today’s world was easily acceptable. Playing it and Tom much older would of course make the whole relationship more poignant, but I guess poignancy was not what the playwright or the players here were after.

As far as I coud tell the whole backstage roles were despatched perfectly: i.e. they were effectively invisible – apart from the very visible set. That, designed by Pauline Lloyd, built by Bob Pettit, was perfect.

I hesitate to lay the blame for the confusion of ages and characters on the direction, since I don’t really know whether it is inbuilt in the play, or its two companion plays with the same characters.

It’s just a pity that with all that talent on display, more attention was not paid to the wood as well as the trees.