Australia’s housing crisis dusts this 40-year-old English play with topicality, but at heart, Michael Frayn’s Benefactors is a timeless, darkly comic and brilliantly written study of human foibles.

The play is told in a series of rueful flashbacks by four characters about events taking place in suburban London in the late 1960s.

Emma Palmer and Gareth Davies in Benefactors. Photo © Prudence Upton

David (Gareth Davies), mild mannered and something of a utopian, is an architect charged with turning acres of dour Victorian semis into a high-density housing project. His wife Jane (Emma Palmer) is an anthropologist – working on same project – and, at he same time, an indefatigable powerhouse of domestic energy.

Over the road live Colin (Matt Minto), an old university chum of David’s, now a journalist, and his wife Sheila (Megan Drury), a former nurse so disempowered by the domineering Colin that she’s become unable to organise the housekeeping basics such as shopping, feeding the kids and getting them to school on time.

Most of those duties have been taken over by Jane and David, who – with regular but good-humoured flickers of exasperation – have Colin and Sheila...