David Tristram’s The Opposite Sex (DnA at St James Cavalier) is packing in the audiences.

It is a farcical sex comedy, expertly written, and in addition it receives expert direction from Herman Grech and hilarious performances from its small cast.

Like a good many other stage farces or farcical comedies, this one relies heavily on coincidence for its plot.

Vicky (Denise Mulholland) who is married to Mark (Alan Montanaro), who is an advertising executive apt to come home late many evenings, is suspected by his wife of being a serial adulterer, and early on the audience begins to think she may be right.

The Avon representative whom Vicky has invited to visit her, turns out to be Judith (Rowena Grima) with whom Mark has had sex before he got married.

Titillated by the memory, Mark convinces Vicky, who knows nothing of the past affair, to invite Judith and her husband to dinner, and when the guests arrive, Vicky is shocked to find out that Judith’s husband Eric (Malcolm Galea) a bearded left-wing college lecturer, is the man with whom she got laid fairly recently in the back of his car.

The evening goes wrong from the start. Even before Eric sets sight on Vicky, he has already made himself objectionable to Mark by pouring scorn on the host’s love of Puccini operas and also by having brought along his own canned beer to drink instead of the wine he knows he will be offered.

At the same time, Vicky is unwittingly insulting to Judith in her evaluation of the bottle of plonk the less than knowledgeable woman has brought along as a gift.

This is just the beginning. Mark and Eric trade veiled and even utterly unveiled insults and Vicky who (another coincidence) happens to be a marriage counsellor, convinces her guests they should have a counselling session with her there and then, while the curious Mark is relegated to the kitchen.

Vicky, who is curious too, asks them about their sex life and this reveals that Eric and Judith have a healthy sex life, unlike Mark and Judith.

At one point, the furious Eric beats up Mark after learning about Judith’s old affair with Mark and ends up in the hands of the police. The play’s ending is not particularly clever and only moderately funny, the biggest laugh going to a wicked gibe hurled by Mark at the departing Eric near the end. You will be relieved to hear, however,that Vicky and Mark have a –temporarily? – good ending.

The intimacy of St James Cavalier helps the relentless sparring and wounding of the characters strike the audience strongly.

Montanaro’s Mark is perhaps too tall for a man who describes his wife as being bigger than he, and is called by someone at one point “a little man” but his richly comical performance brings out again and again his immaturity and his physical cowardice, and an endless series of facial expressions makes the audience like him while faintly despising him.

Does he go too much over the top when he gives vent to his fury on being left alone, I thinkafter overhearing that Vicky has slept with Eric? Maybe, but his thumping and hurling of a cushion, and being after a little while discovered doing so, is one of the production’s comic peaks.

Mulholland’s playing is not so much in the tradition of farcical comedy, like that of Montanaro, as in that of mainstream comedy, but it works just as well and complements Montanaro’s beautifully.

Her comedy is that of restraint, of frozen horror, of fury expressed with physical control and vocally without using too much volume, a technique that works best in an intimate theatre like this.

Socially, this Vicky comes out as the classiest of the four, so the discovery that she too has erred is much more of a come-down than it is for the others, even if we subsequently learn her adultery has been an entirely revengeful one.

Galea is surly and boorish and, we soon discover, also triumphantly sexist. Like Mulholland, he relies much on his vocal delivery to bring out his personality, but we sense he is a dangerous person when antagonised, so his aggression of Mark is not altogether surprising.

We hear a good deal about his sexual prowess and his love of violent sex, so it is a relief to learnhow he was once deceived by a good-looking transvestite…

As Judith, Grima makes a welcome return to the stage. Right at the start she makes us realise she is not one of the brightest, and when she thinks Puccini is some sort of dish, our opinion of her brain sinks even farther.

She makes it easy for the audience to accept that someone gentle and timid should have appealed to Mark, so very different from Eric, and in the marriage counselling scene we also learn that sexually she is more expert than the sex-starved Vicky.

This Judith is funny and also very likeable.