There's a feast of Ayckbourn in Bath this week; some revived, some new, performed by a versatile ensemble company.

The first of the new, Arrivals and Departures, is innovative. It is not comedy as you might expect from Ayckbourn, although it has comic moments. It is also not a continuous story. It is two stories in one.

The construction of the play is clever. The set is a railway terminus, where ostensibly a covert military team is waiting to capture a terrorist. And although the waiting and the preparation are the backcloth, the people we focus on are two fringe members of the team, a female army officer and a traffic warden flown from Yorkshire to identify the suspect.

Esme, (Elizabeth Boag) is taciturn in the extreme and we gather early on that she has serious personal and professional problems in the past and now. Ms Boag delivers a superbly controlled performance as this enigmatic character.

In contrast is Barry, (Kim Wall) a garrulous Yorkshireman who is nonplussed by Esme’s stonewalling of his well-intentioned attempts at communication. But as the play progresses Barry’s apparently mindless prattle is revealed as a cover for troubles at least as grave as Esme’s. Kim Wall progresses from someone you could cheerfully throttle to a man for whom you feel immense compassion.

The layers of their stories are revealed in flashbacks, imaginatively lit on an almost empty stage.

The two acts of the play are almost mirror images of one another. There is simply a shift of perspective.

It is intriguing and utterly absorbing, with a hard working cast of actors playing a couple of dozen different roles.

Midweek sees a switch to vintage Ayckbourn, with Time of My Life, and Saturday morning sees two connected new one-act comedies, Farcicals.