Alan Ayckbourn has always had two main strengths. He takes high-level risks with comedy, darkening it where he can. He takes technical chances, too, setting himself daunting dramatic puzzles and solving them with maximum bravura. But after sitting through eight hours of Ayckbourn, and seeing the events of one fraught weekend as they occur more or less simultaneously in a dining room, a living room and a garden — well, I left Matthew Warchus’s fine revival feeling that the sage of Scarborough has written little if anything more ambitious, daring and emotionally punchy than his 1974 trilogy, The Norman Conquests.

Even the Old Vic gets into the act, for its auditorium has become a theatre in the round, with everything occurring on a small circle that, before each play’s opening, contains a toy version of the Sussex village where the action unfurls. It rises to reveal different parts of the house to which Paul Ritter’s nerdish Reg and his bossy, prurient wife, Amanda Root’s Sarah, come to tend his bedridden mother while the old crone’s oppressed daughter and permanent carer, Jessica Hynes’s Annie, takes a weekend off.

Whichever of these interlocking plays you see — and each is self-sufficient and may be enjoyed in any order — it’s soon clear that Annie secretly plans to spend her weekend away with her brother-in-law, Stephen Mangan’s feckless Norman. But she changes her mind, which is an error, for trouble ensues in all three settings, but especially in the living room. That’s because Mangan, who is less impish and more turbulent than Tom Courtenay in the original production, not only pushes his sexual luck with Annie, Sarah and even Amelia Bullmore as his weary wife: he gets spectacularly drunk and ensures that confusion spirals into chaos.

“I’m wondering what’s the cleanest and simplest way to finish myself off,” says the glum, beardy Norman, provoking Reg to reply: “Well, don’t get married, it’s long and messy.” That sums up a scepticism about relationships, typical of early Ayckbourn, that extends from everyday marital callousness to Annie’s all-too-platonic flirtation with Ben Miles’s Tom, a vet whose attitude to people blends bafflement with inertia. That role was originally played by Michael Gambon, one of whose moments I remember well. An informal supper was rendered gloriously absurd by the simple ruse of seating him on a child’s chair, so that little but his head was visible above the table. But either Miles or the chair, or both, are taller here, which somewhat spoils the joke.

Still, that’s pretty well my only criticism. There are occasional longueurs, but they have a Chekhovian feel, with Annie’s unspoken wistfulness or Sarah’s sexual frustration quietly apparent.

Anyway, you’ll admire the skill which makes an entrance in one play an exit in another. Out of the dining room goes Reg, dispatched by his pushy wife to view the shenanigans in the living room, and returns with a wastepaper basket. Into the living room comes Reg, who inexplicably picks up the basket and disappears back into the dining room. There, as elsewhere, you’ll laugh.

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