It’s the second half of Neil Simon’s comedy when things kick off. After the sweet-tempered wisecracks before the interval, the mood has turned sour. Corie and Paul are newlyweds and their six-day marriage is faltering. In Elizabeth Newman’s production, the two of them circle each other in a ferocious dance across Adrian Rees’s set (all 1960s pastel pink, yellow and turquoise with a backdrop of West Side Story fire escapes).
With the stakes high, they are riveting to watch. As Corie, Jessica Hardwick represents the heart: fast, mercurial and emotionally intelligent. She orbits Olivier Huband’s Paul like only polar opposites can, her magnetic pull as powerful as her furious realisation that she has married a stuffed shirt.
Yet Huband, symbolising the head, resists the temptation to play dull, showing his own brand of passion behind the cool logic of his lawyerly arguments. They are compellingly matched and, if anything, more convincing in their animosity than in their initial lusty attraction.
It’s a thrilling scene, matched by the hollow desolation that follows and, in the 1963 Broadway hit play immortalised in the Jane Fonda/Robert Redford movie, Simon builds to it with subtle craftsmanship. In a kind of inverted Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the older generation play out an angst-free parallel romance as Clare Grogan’s Ethyl allows herself to be emotionally liberated by Hamish Clark’s devil-may-care Victor Velasco. Their odd-couple affair has a daffy joy that puts the histrionics into perspective.
Yes, it’s throwaway; yes, it’s too short to deal with much complexity, but, topical flu joke notwithstanding, it is a breezily welcome comedy for troubled times. And the girl gets to keep the boy.
• At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 29 March and the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 3–25 April.
