Old age is something everyone fears, even those far away from it. Quartet in Autumn, the new play debuting at the Arcola Theatre, manages to create an intimate, comic space for all in the audience to confront this universal yet challenging theme. Adapted from Barbara Pym’s novel of the same name by Samantha Harvey (author of the Booker Prize-winning ‘Orbital’), the play revolves around the atomised lives of four colleagues approaching retirement.

All are troubled – in varying degrees of openness – by the precariousness of their age, whether through becoming sick or ‘falling through the net of the welfare state.’ Though the play is set in London in the 1970s, this social climate feels uncomfortably familiar to our own.

It is difficult to decide which of the four characters is more likable. Marcia (Pooky Quesnel) is highly-strung and defiant, intensely defensive of her milk bottles as much as her health regimen. She will not listen to any advice, especially concerning her consultant Mr Strong, with whom she believes her appointments are actually dates.

Marcia shares her coffee with Norman (‘we share it because it’s cheaper’), who is as no-holds-barred as they come. Surly and yet comically towing a tight-rope: he constantly pries into Marcia’s health, and then ruminates on why women ‘go on about their bodies but still manage to be so secretive.’

The fervently religious Edwin (Anthony Calf) lives his life by the Christian calendar, and is often found mindlessly listing the religious services in his monologues. Letty is perhaps the most fragile of all, moving between bed-sits after an unmarried life, and struggling most of all to conceal her regret and fear of a ‘windless life’ moving from ‘one windless place to another.’ All actors interact beautifully and naturally with each other, with a charming, comic feel reminiscent of The Vicar of Dibley.

Yet the staging deftly juxtaposes this mood. In the first half, which focuses on the final years of their working lives, the centrepiece is a Severance-style connected desk around which the characters work and chatter in nameless job. The banality of their existence is amplified by a garish red which washes over the rest of the stage, featureless apart from some giant industrial lights above them and a set of filing cabinets.

There are no representatives from the company that appear at the moment when Marcia and Letty retire, only a one-man chorus from the company that announces it invisibly off stage before the interval, and thanks them coldly for ‘doing good by stealth.’

The tones of the first half shift between tragedy and comedy so subtly, assisted by the fractional changes in lighting and the growing use of monologues on the fears of ageing, which start off being performed independently, and then culminate near the end of the first half by being performed together.

This quartet is harmonious at first, and then becomes increasingly and purposefully discordant. We are reminded that although these are long-standing, friendly colleagues, they in essence refuse to look after each other as the isolation of old age takes hold. It is a wonderful piece of theatre.

In the second half, the symbolic staging is cranked up, with chairs stacked upside down and filing cabinets laying like coffins. The colleagues meet up post- retirement, and their banal conversations still echo with detachment. Paul Rider’s performance of Norman is particularly effective here, as he somehow gives weight to dialogue on the most ordinary of things – he can make descriptions of tinned food ring with sorrow.

But the main issues of the second half come from the narrative lines, particularly that of Marcia, whose death feels quite abrupt following a glimpse of frenzied ramblings on a hospital bed. The slapstick in the crematorium scene also feels a little out of place.

The strength of Harvey’s script comes from the existential reflections, such a distinctive feature of her prose, which continue powerfully and comically until the end, but without much definition given to plot.

The most distinctive narrative arc is given to Letty, the most sympathetic of all the characters, who gains a stronger sense of her autonomy, and is pivotal in leading the play into a warming conclusion: ‘Life still holds infinite possibilities for change.’