Christmas is a time when disparate groups of people come together to spend awkward moments in each other’s company. For a lot of people, distant friends and relatives who are mercifully absent during the rest of the year pop back into your life with all the subtlety, grace and sheer fun of a brick being tossed through your car windscreen.

Alan Ayckbourn’s play En Fröjdefull Jul explores just how chaotic and traumatic a holiday season reunion can get, complete with drunken cooking, kids with guns and the kind of inter-familial tension not seen since Cleopatra had all her siblings massacred. If that sounds like a welcome distraction for you from the stresses of Christmas shopping, it’s playing at Stadsteatern all through the Christmas season.

En fröjdefull jul, Stora scenen Stadsteatern, until Dec 31