ST JOHN'S Players had plenty of support in the newly launched Swan for their opening night of Table Manners on Tuesday.

The eager audience provided laughter and some good-natured heckling to the cast as they proceeded through Alan Ayckbourn's 1973 family comedy.

Company stalwarts Anne Smith and Paul Hughes provide most of the play's up-beat moments, their well-intonated performances about everyday married life keep the audience engaged.

Scandalising the family, who have come together in the dining room in the home of spinster Annie, is Norman, played by Paul Hughes.

In typical Ayckbourn-style he lays siege to his host, who is also his frustrated sister-in-law. In contempt of his conventional middle-class relatives, he continues to horrify them by doing exactly as he likes.

Helping to see why he might behave as he does is wife Ruth. In the role Dorothy Colman portrays such an unloving, career-obsessed woman who clearly despises the rest of her family that it's almost hard to blame her desperately attention-seeking husband.

Table Manners continues in the Swan until Saturday (tickets from 01905 611427).

Ally Hardy.