NFP's 80th birthday celebrations moved into their second night with three very different short plays.

Gillian Plowman's Two Summers, set in 1930s Singapore and 1970s England, explores the relationship between a Colonel's wife (Alison Trow) and a piano-playing Sergeant (Matthew Walker) in a novel way that involves an elderly couple (Sonia Collyer and Adam Ogilvie).

This touching story, well paced by director Judy Spooner, was beautifully performed by its cast, which included Clive Rigden as the Colonel.

This was followed by two Chekhov plays, both directed with skill by P J Stevens.

The first was the decidedly weird The Dental Surgeon, in which a vodka-fuelled Medical Orderly (Tim Schuler) attempts, and fails, to remove a tooth from a terrified sexton (Matthew Ellison) as the housekeeper (Georgette Ellison) offers her own advice. Brilliantly performed and extremely funny - definitely Chekhov in lighter mood - it probably put most of the audience off dentists for life.

Finally came Swan Song, a real tour-de-force for the very talented Matthew Ellison, in a tragic-comic tale of an elderly actor, poignantly dressed as a clown, who on the eve of a benefit performance finally acknowledges that the audience love only the character, not the real man.