Rules For Living is a dark, inventive comedy by British playwright Sam Holcroft that explores how unconscious coping mechanisms and unwritten rules govern our behaviour during family gatherings.

The play takes place in real-time on Christmas Day as an extended middle-class family gathers in the kitchen for a traditional festive lunch. Matriarch Edith demands absolute perfection and rigour while preparing the meal and welcoming back her stroke-paralysed husband, Francis, from the hospital.

As brothers Adam and Matthew arrive with their partners and children, what begins as a tense holiday tradition quickly unravels into a chaotic disaster of buried resentments, bitter grudges, and flying food. What sets the play apart is its literal, theatrical display of psychological defence mechanisms: five of the characters must strictly follow behavioural rules (projected visually for the audience like a game show) tied to specific triggers, such as needing to clean, to stay calm, drinking when contradicted, or standing up to tell a joke.

The cleverness of the play is that the audience knows the rules governing each character while the characters themselves don’t necessarily understand what is happening. Those rules gradually become more elaborate… It has the recognisable family-comedy appeal of an Alan Ayckbourn-style play, but the theatrical device gives it something considerably more contemporary and distinctive.