2026

WADS' first production of the year was Alan Ayckbourn’s Neighbourhood Watch, where brother and sister Martin and Hilda live together and have just moved into a house in the Bluebell Hill Development. Just as they are preparing for a housewarming gathering, their peace is shattered by a young clarinet-wielding trespasser in their garden. This leads to an alarming escalation of events as the residents of the development take extreme measures to protect themselves, becoming an authoritarian force controlling the lives of the people they are supposed to protect.

That said, it’s very amusing, as Michael Billington confirmed in his review for The Guardian when Neighbourhood Watch premiered in Scarborough in 2011: 
“One of Alan Ayckbourn's least appreciated qualities is the sharpness of his social antennae. At the very moment when there is a lot of political babble about a ‘broken society’ and the need for a vigorous communal response, Ayckbourn comes up with a new play that confronts the danger of leaving law and order to volunteer vigilantes. It is refreshing to report that the piece is highly ambitious, biliously funny and right on the button.”