From a sisterly snake to a suburban safari Ayckbourn's new season has the lot, reports CHARLES HUTCHINSON

SCARBOROUGH master of comedy Alan Ayckbourn's 61st play promises a sting in the tail: Snake In The Grass will be a thriller.

With his 58th, 59th and 60th plays - the Damsels in Distress trilogy of GamePlan, FlatSpin and RolePlay - coming to the end of a national tour and aiming for the West End, Ayckbourn will direct his latest premiere at the Stephen Joseph Theatre this summer.

In Snake In The Grass, the sunlit garden of sisters Annabel and Miriam is filled with deeply buried childhood memories. When night begins to fall, does only the past come back to haunt them, or is it something infinitely more terrifying? Find out on various dates between May 30 and September 7.

An Ayckbourn golden oldie from 1978, Joking Apart, will be revived on and off from July 11 to September 14.

Earlier in the Summer 2002 season, Ayckbourn will re-unite with Tim Firth, writer of television hits Preston Front and Border Caf, who took his first steps on the play-writing ladder in the lunchtime spotlight at the Stephen Joseph.

From April 25 to May 18, Firth will take a walk on the wild side in his sixth Scarborough premiere, The Safari Party, having enjoyed success previously with the likes of Neville's Island and Love Songs For Shopkeepers.

The story for number six? Whereas going on a safari party in Africa involves hiking across a domain of beasts in pumping heat, going on a safari party in Cheshire requires tottering from house to house for a different course of a meal at the home of each couple. One safari demands considerably more ambushes, traps and predators than the other, and it is not the African one.

First Foot, the February and March season of new plays by playwrights new to Scarborough, ends this weekend, and Summer 2002 will open with the return of Northern Broadsides, purveying their distinctive brand of Shakespeare from the M62 corridor. Barrie Rutter's production of Macbeth, newly up and running in Halifax last night, will be on the East Coast from April 8 to 13.

Stephen Joseph Theatre and Orange Tree Theatre, in Richmond, Surrey, will renew the fruitful partnership that brought Torben Betts's Clockwatching and David Cregan's Whispers Along The Patio to the stage in both North and South in 2001, this time with the Orange Tree's production of Happy Birthday Dear Alice.

Written by Irish dramatist Bernard Farrell and directed by Orange Tree artistic director Sam Walters, it tells of Alice being best friends with Jimmy ever since she was widowed by an accident involving a bull and a faulty deaf aid. Year after year they thwart the plans of Alice's children, who want to see mother settled safely into a residential home so that they can carry on their lives without worry or guilt. Alice has other ideas, from May 22 to July 6.

The summer menu of lunchtime theatre in The Restaurant will return with six new productions: double bills of Michael Chaplin's The Hope and Lee Hall Two's Company, and Alan Plater's Wor Tony And The Great White Shark alongside A Day Like Today by Novid Parsi, plus two single pieces, Stuart Fortey's The Kaiser And I and River's Up by Alex Jones.

The diary will be completed by Berkoff's Women, April 18 and 19; a platform with Sue MacGregor, May 4; the David Newton Trio, May 12; Alan Price, June 23; a film season and tea time and tiny time tales.

For bookings, ring 01723 370541.

Updated: 09:38 Friday, March 15, 2002