THE world of amateur theatre is fraught with danger. Just ask Bev Jones, the doyen of York producers, who has been given a heavy time via correspondence on the York Light Opera Company website since his decision to spend more time in the Mediterranean.

Alan Ayckbourn taps into this world of off-stage dramas in his wonderfully witty tale of the Pendon Amateur Light Operatic Society's production of The Beggar's Opera. Ayckbourn had been spurred into writing plays by the inadequacy of the scripts he was being asked to perform in his acting days, but there are greater forces at play here than a writer-director's wish to take revenge on bothersome actors.

What he is doing is applying the "swan principle". On the glistening surface - the part the audience sees on a night's visit to the theatre - a production is doing swimmingly, gliding along happily. Beneath the gentle ripples, however, the legs are kicking out in all directions through muddy waters. This is the part that normally goes unseen: the part that Ayckbourn has revealed in A Chorus Of Disapproval (as has Michael Frayn in Noises Off).

This summer's production marks the 20th anniversary of this man-watching play - in the interim there has been Michael Winner's loser of a film version - and neither amateur dramatics nor human behaviour has changed a jot in the interim. Just as we still recognise the characters in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, 50 years on from the Welsh poet's dissection of a Welsh village on a day's journey into night, so the foibles and frictions, the fumbling and failings of the Pendon players are as familiar as a milkman's jaunty whistle.

No less familiar are the faces in Ayckbourn's cast: each has already played its part in the Scarborough summer season, led off by Philip York, who has thrown off the shackles of starched collar and tie to revel in the role of harassed director Dafydd ap Llewellyn, whose hapless production becomes the stuff of an extremely tangled suburban web. In love with theatre and the Welsh singing voice, he is out of love with life, out of contact with his children and out of synch with his neglected wife Hannah (Sarah Moyle). York gives a superb interpretation of a typically frustrated, frustrating male Ayckbourn character.

Hannah is drawn to a new recruit from Leeds, the seemingly innocent abroad Guy Jones (the ever personable Bill Champion), who rises through the ranks as quickly as he becomes a magnet to the swinging Hubbards, man-eating Fay (the slinky Billie-Claire Wright) and her builder husband Ian (Stephen Beckett).

The scene-stealing Roger Sloman's intense, nutty-as-a-biscuit Jarvis Huntley-Pike only adds to the chorus of approval for this joyous revival.

Box office: 01723 370541.

Updated: 11:59 Thursday, July 22, 2004