THE producers of the Holly and the Ivy must have been kicking themselves.

The play set at Christmas time opened on the hottest day of the year so far.

With references to deep snow outside, it was actually a beautiful evening in real life Manchester.

But what did they expect putting a show on in March?

Wondering about the timing, I was left also wondering about the strength of the play itself.

The characters were all from that most old-fashioned of social strata - the gentile middle class.

Their concerns were all about "poor-daddy" and poor-mummy and "poor this-and-that".

The only light relief in the otherwise very serious play was the brilliantly comic elder aunts who had the audience in stitches.

The steam-roller of fate seems to be ready to crush all the characters into frustrated and unfulfilled lives.

But this playwright is just too much of an optimist to leave his characters in misery.

In a somewhat implausible twist of the plot, the prodigal daughter Margaret suddenly has a revelation which leaves everyone happy.

Religion and a search for truth provides a lot of home-spun philosophy.

But the scene between Margaret and her vicar father I found genuinely moving.

The play opens in a slow fashion and never builds up much pace even when son Michael has a drunken show-down with his father.

This is a period piece which the producers must have hoped they could pull off, despite people's minds being no where near the Christmas period.

On the whole, a play worth seeing for a well structured plot which is neither too demanding nor, thanks to very skilled acting, too dull. MATTHEW TAYLOR

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