Bernard Farrell's new suburban farce champions the power of positive thinking. "Let's try to show everyone that, recession or no recession, we are happy and this evening is going be fun," declares book-club hostess Ann, whose cheeriness becomes increasingly frantic as her guests arrive. Having admitted men for the first time to their monthly discussion of fiction over wine and food, "the girls" quickly regret it. Unctuous bank manager Robert, played with a nice hint of menace by Louis Lovett, wastes no time in asserting his social position and dominates the gathering, while Ann's status anxiety can only be assuaged by a drip-feed of red wine.
With safely distant authors Virginia Woolf and Harper Lee on the reading list, there is little danger of any social realism close to home threatening the creaky mechanism of the comedy of manners. Perhaps the comment from overbearing Jennifer about the sentimentality of To Kill a Mocking Bird is a knowing wink from the playwright to his audience, but that's about as much subtext as we're offered in a production that favours histrionics, caricatures and heavily signposted plotting. Hints of sexual improprieties spill out over the whiskey, and marital deceptions and frictions are played on a loop, less funny with each repetition.
Although billed as a post-Celtic Tiger play, this could have been written any time over recent decades. A few topical references to recession and debt are dropped into a familiar form, in which nothing is probed in depth. Despite the high energy of the ensemble, they don't overcome the limitations of a play that misses opportunities for real satire.
