Surprises, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, review There is something rather wonderful about the fact that Alan Ayckbourn's 76th play - twice as many as Shakespeare, for heavens" sake - is characterised by a faintly gauche air of experimentalism. It is not new for Ayckbourn to set a play in the future, as he does here. He has explored the concept of "what if?" - his pithy definition of sci-fi - since the late Eighties. Nevertheless Surprises still feels almost improvised, as if Ayckbourn had decided to move his usual cast of anxious suburbanites into a world of time travel and hyper-longevity, stick an android in their midst and see what happens. The results are variable, theatrically speaking. This is Ayckbourn's first three-act play since 1972 but, unlike his early masterpieces, Surprises does nothing innovative with that conventional structure. Indeed the first act, in which spoiled daddy's girl Grace (an assured Ayesha Antoine) plays with time travel in order to control her boyfriend's life, feels thin. The point of setting it "sometime soon," as the programme notes have it, seems like not much more than an opportunity for sitcom-style jokes about technology, as when time travel is represented by a people-carrying trolley driven by a camp steward straight out of Hi-de-Hi. Since Ayckbourn also directs (in the round), this must be his choice, but it feels like an easy means to keep the play anchored in familiarity. Things pick up in the second act. Rather oddly this is thanks to the android character, Jan (a brilliant Richard Stacey), who works in "S and M" - Security and Maintenance - for lawyer Lorraine (the excellent Sarah Parks), with whom Jan is besotted. This leads to perhaps the oddest love scene played in a theatre. And Ayckbourn suddenly shows all his old dramatist's wiles in the way he makes Jan, the innocent half-human, reveal the humanity - or lack of it - in those around him. Admirably, Ayckbourn is attempting to consider what makes us human in a world where both genes and bodies are increasingly freely manipulated. Yet the people in his future seem not much different from those of today: obsessed with ageing, in need of love, in the end preferring reality to its virtual avatar. Whether this is evidence of natural optimism, or of a playwright gravitating naturally towards his home territory, it is hard to say. Until July 28, and Sept 11- Oct 13. Chichester Festival, Aug 8-Sept 8