Taking his cue from a line in T.S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton, Simon Gray has written what is probably his saddest, deepest and certainly most moving play, an elegy of regret set in a typical English garden, with a lawn, flowers, a chi1dren’s swing and a view of hazy hills. The kind of garden, in fact, to which the upwardly mobile, such as Harry, a literary agent, and his wife Louise, a would-be novelist, aspire, both as a retreat and a work-place. We meet them in 1980 just as they have fallen under its spell. We leave them, sadder and wiser, ten years later, their marriage in shreds, their children, whose hidden laughter rippled in the foliage, left home, Natalie, a single parent in a council flat, Nigel, after an accident of the type that can only happen in the threatening countryside and a suspected brain tumour, a student of comparative theology in the States.

For Harry and Louise it has been, however, a decade of material success, for Louise in particular, whose small gift for writing has borne fruit in a series of romantic novels, written in an obsessive frenzy while she neglects her husband, who has engaged in a succession of infidelities, and children, who have both suffered because love has been put on one side. The unchanging characters are Harry's father Ben, who has proceeded from late middle age to near-dotage without finding the faith he has needed, and Ronnie, the local vicar with a wife in a mental home, who has lost what little faith he had but has retained the capacity to love.

Sensitively directed by the author, Hidden Laughter is not, one feels, a play which courts easy popularity, but yields up riches as hidden as the laughter of which it speaks, catching the resonances of the eighties and occasionally making us smile with recognition. Immaculately acted, it has fine performances from Felicity Kendal as the wife grasping her independence, Kevin McNally as the husband inexorably forced more into his own career and driven into satisfying his sexual needs elsewhere, and Peter Barkworth and Richard Vernon as the older men, all with the ability to give love in common but denying themselves the opportunity to show it. Samuel West and Caroline Harker convey the growing despair of the children, with Sam Dastor making two telling appearances a cynical novelist client of Harry's.