There could hardly be a more appropriate moment, with the UK deliberating over whether to support France in its airstrikes on Syria, in which to see Wallace Shawn’s challenging new play. It begins as an entertainment about a theatrical reunion in the Talk House, a genteel American cafe serving “charming and unexpected snacks”. The content is agreeable, eccentric, more or less familiar.
But then Shawn takes his hands right off the steering wheel and sets the play on a collision course. It had been about theatre but is overtaken by a surreal debate about targeted bombings (“How is a threat really assessed?”). It’s surreal because actors and a costume mistress confess to being government-employed killers. But Shawn’s theatrical universe is not intended to be literal. It’s a bad dream in which desperation is real, pessimism permeable: the centre cannot hold. He organises laughter in the dark but cannot restore the light.
Josh Hamilton plays Robert, a playwright, with bogus amiability and a repertoire of unreliable smiles. Naomi Wirthner is amoral Annette, “soothing” costume mistress and part-time bomber. Simon Shepherd’s excellent Tom is an urbane actor protected and deceived by his success. The women who run the cafe are more theatrical than the visiting actors: Sinéad Matthews is shatteringly good as Jane, and Anna Calder-Marshall compelling as the cafe proprietor. The Quay Brothers’ traditional set (bentwood chairs, equestrian mural) is in deliberately unsettling contrast to the play’s radicalism.
The key figure is Shawn’s Dick, a husk of an actor. The slide into queasy unreality begins when we learn Dick has been mugged by “friends”. Gleefully bruised, he volunteers that he was beaten for “crossing a line”. Saying the unsayable without rancour is his forte – Shawn’s too. His performance is weirdly engaging: a drunk grotesque who speaks true. Yet this is a play in which no one knows anyone (Robert says “knowing” people is dated). The poverty of rapport between characters disturbs. The play stops, but has no ending. It is for us to try to answer its bleak questions, to see what it might mean to be undeluded. Ian Rickson directs meticulously. He is in his element and never loses his nerve.
• At the Dorfman theatre until 30 March. Box office: 020-7452 3000
