The Company of Ten will be taking audience members away for an early summer break to a New England lakeside holiday home in their next production, On Golden Pond.

The play is a bittersweet and moving tale of one dysfunctional family’s attempts to overcome the seriously strained relationships within it.

“The questions posed by the play for me really are: can these strained relationships so common in families ever be repaired, and will Norman be able to come to terms with his own mortality and decline, as indeed we all have to sooner or later,” says director Abbe Waghorn.

The nub of the problem is crotchety, cantankerous retiree Norman who, with his wife Ethel, arrives to spend a quiet summer at their lodge beside Golden Pond just as they have done for the last fifty years. But instead of fishing, he spends his time morbidly obsessing about his own mortality.

The psychological and emotional temperature soars when their estranged daughter Chelsea visits with her new fiancé and his teenage son Billy in tow. Amongst the baggage she brings is her overwhelming resentment at her father’s apparent inability to parent her in the ways she thinks he should.

Only Ethel seems to appreciate that her husband’s gruff exterior conceals a shyness he is desperate to keep hidden. When she offers to look after Billy, the elderly couple find their idyll both challenged and enriched.

The play was made into the hugely successful, multi Oscar winning 1981 film of the same name, starring Katharine Hepburn and real-life father and daughter Henry and Jane Fonda.

According to Jane, the fictional relationship in the film uncannily mirrored her own with Henry and working on the movie together enabled them to break down several life-long barriers in their own relationship.

Abbey Theatre, Westminster Lodge, Holywell Hill, St Albans, AL1 2DL, May 11 until May 19. Details: 01727 857861