IGNORE the Rumours. Contrary to the title in the Joseph Rowntree Theatre autumn programme, the Rowntree Players are performing Trio, and not the comedy Rumours.

That said, there is comedy aplenty in Trio, both planned and unplanned in the case of Lucy Knowles accidentally breaking a chair in No Other Way.

The Players have forged one show from three short plays that brought the York society awards at drama festivals in the past year, hence that Trio title.

Each play involves mind games, and more puzzling behaviour than at an Agatha Christie murder-mystery weekend.

Paul Beard's black comedy Cliff's Edge is set at Beachy Head, that much favoured suicide spot, where successful actor Gary (Graham Smith) is seeking a moment of peace and solitude as he learns his lines and contemplates one last exit, stage left.

Cliff (Andy Love) prides himself on talking people out of jumping off the cliff with his cheery manner, and his perkiness is exactly the kind to avoid on a Sunday coastal stroll. No wonder Gary finds him irritating, and so does the frank and frankly worrying Sue (Jeanette Hunter). Where will it all end? In dark-humoured laughs for the audience, the most cheesy of pay-off lines and three fine performances, particularly from Love.

The Rowntree Players youth wing, the Young Pretenders, presents Jack Booth's No Other Way, directed by Eileen Lavender and Peter Major. The Flowers family is in line for money left by Mother but not before the old boy upstairs snuffs it. Young Rose Flowers (Lucy Knowles) decides to speed up that hand-over process with the aid of some poison.

Perhaps it is the burden of all the Flowers women - Lily (Sam McIntyre), Rose and Daisy (the outstanding Louise Rigg) - having floral names but certainly their behaviour is unconventional. Yet they have to present the face of normality under inquisition from Dr Foster (Grace Bird), Mrs Parkin (Sian Davies) and Chloe Simpson (Jenny Bonnie), as they cover their tracks in the manner of a twisted Joe Orton farce. The chair-breaking incident only adds to the manic humour.

Martyn Hunter directed Andy Love and Graham Smith in Cliff's Edge; Love directs Hunter and Smith in Bogey, a play as strange as the name of its writer, Polychronis Koutsakis. This is the most difficult piece of the night, a study of self-delusion in a mental hospital, where Man 1 and Man 2 believe they are famous movie characters. Hunter and Smith exact all the bewildered Beckett-style bleakness and neurosis.

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Updated: 11:15 Friday, October 17, 2003