Diane (EJ Martin) is nervous when she and her boyfriend Nick (Philip Honeywell) arrive at her older colleague Richard’s birthday party in his Canary Wharf flat. She has been in her new job in risk management for only a week and hasn’t yet figured out the office politics. With no sign of anyone else from work, she and Nick are forced to make small talk with Richard, who admits to being entirely lacking in passion or charisma. But when Richard’s wife turns up, the party gets going with a vengeance.
Written by David K Barnes, best known for the podcast Wooden Overcoats, about funeral-parlour turf wars, Birthday Suit is often very funny. It comes across like Alan Ayckbourn for millennials as it investigates ambition, fulfilment and being yourself. Liam Bewley’s delightful performance as the nerdish Richard invests a character who could just be a cruel figure of fun with an unapologetic, sweet certainty about who he is and what he wants while the others get steadily drunker and flail around in discontented confusion.
There is real potential here but, although the laughs keep coming, the play runs out of steam and sense of purpose in the second half, and the character of Richard’s wife, the posturing Valerie (Emily Stride), is never entirely convincing. But it’s a sparky evening, stylishly delivered on a shoestring. The Play That Goes Wrong began at this address: who knows what may happen to this?
• At the Old Red Lion, London, until 4 February. Box office: 0844 412 4307.
