Playwright Torben Betts—whose last play, Invincible, was a bit too slavishly indebted to the master, Alan Ayckbourn—returns with Caroline’s Kitchen, much less enervating and far more entertaining.

The setting of the play’s title is where Caroline—a famous at-home chef whose videos explode online—goes through a hell of a day. Leo, her beloved son, just graduated with honors from Cambridge, returns home wondering why she hasn’t told his dad that he’s gay. He also drops a bombshell: he’s refusing their money for an apartment to travel to Syria for humanitarian purposes. Her retired banker husband Mike has just returned from his regular golf game and will hear nothing of their son’s sexual proclivities or future plans. Amanda, Caroline’s new assistant, is a bitch on wheels with an obvious—if unrequited—crush on Graeme, Caroline’s strapping young handyman, with whom Caroline’s has been carrying on an affair. Finally, Sally, Graeme’s wife, arrives, having just discovered proof of the adulterous couple (Graeme conveniently forgot his phone that morning): but she is mistakenly believed to be a potential buyer of Caroline and Mike’s house.

In 90 minutes, Betts skillfully orchestrates the escalating insanity among these six people, the misunderstandings and anger, the amorous and murderous moments. It all comes to a head when Amanda is banished from the house, Sally grabs a knife sitting on the kitchen’s island, and a terrifying thunderstorm threatens to bring down the wrath of God, literally and figuratively. 

Director Alistair Whatley sublimely orchestrates the controlled onstage chaos, aided spectacularly by the increasingly (and hilariously) unhinged performances by his peerless cast of six: the standouts are Aden Gillett’s utterly unctuous Mike and Elizabeth Hoag’s more subtly characterized Sally. Betts has learned from Ayckbourn to take what’s moving along as sheer farce and stop on a dime, shift gears completely and create something fantastically, even touchingly indelible. 

Although Betts ratchets up the lunacy and manipulates his characters for his own ends more blatantly than Ayckbour—which may be why Betts' play ends with a whimper instead of a comic bang—Caroline’s Kitchen has been written, staged and acted with such ferocious wit that its minor shortcomings ultimately don’t matter.