Mick Mahoney's new play is a short, sharp satire on crass materialism: on a world where you are what you own and where possession is nine-tenths of the folklore. But although the dialogue is fast and clever, there is just a hint of snobbish romanticism about the idea that old money is superior to new and that the acquisitive has replaced the inquisitive society.
Mahoney's compressed plot takes a good bit of unravelling. The key point, however, is that Tony, a property-owning Islington cabbie, and his wife Carol have taken under their wing single-mum Emma and her teenage son. But Tony's form of brand name-dropping charity is put to a number of severe tests: first by the unexpected arrival of Emma's ex-partner who turns out to be a rehabilitated drug-addict with HIV and then by the news that his own son, Jamie, has blighted his burgeoning career as a boy-actor by getting nicked for dealing.
You can see what Mahoney is driving at: that materialism is no substitute for morality. And in Tony he creates a vivid picture of a sad monster who has succumbed to the ersatz dreams of a go-getting society.
Tony believes that as long as you wear the right wrist-watch or know the best Thai restaurant in London or have a son and daughter who are mini TV-celebrities, then the gods will always protect you. And what Mahoney shows, with some sharpness, is the shattering of Tony's hubristic belief that the family that preys together stays together.
In order to make his point, however, Mahoney manipulates character and incident. It was never clear to me why Emma, who is both tougher and better-off than she seems, should have long tolerated Tony's ogling condescension.
And, without giving the game away, the play leaves you with the impression that it's all right to live off other people's money but irrepressibly vulgar to make your own. Behind Mahoney's bilious satire on nouveau-riche nerdishness lies a sense that the working classes were better off when they were happily poor.
But, even if the play leaves an odd taste in the mouth, it's put across with punishing vigour in Anna Mackmin's Theatre Upstairs production. Paul Ritter has exactly the right mouthy attack as the cabbie who has all the knowledge but little wisdom and there is good work from Claire Rushbrook as the quietly piss-taking Emma and from Justin Salinger as the reformed addict who found God in Bournemouth.
You can't fault Mr Mahoney's social antennae; but, in making a materialistic cab-driver his satirical target, you feel he's attacking the symptom rather than the disease.
· Until July 12. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
