Bedrooms, as Alan Ayckbourn has proved, are hives of activity. And Simon Mendes da Costa in his astonishingly assured second play shows they can be venues for rows, revelations and recriminations as well as occasional bouts of sex: on this evidence, I'd say da Costa is the kind of popular comic dramatist the West End has long been pining for.
What he does, ingeniously, is interweave past and present in a middle-class bedroom. In the late 1950s we see Louis, an adulterous solicitor, enjoying sex with a female pupil: what he doesn't know until too late is that his son, Tony, is privy to their lovemaking. And in the present we see the family truculently gathering for Louis's funeral. With Tony now a disgruntled middle-aged man hitched to a hideous vulgarian and bitterly resentful of his younger brother, the bedroom is transformed from a passion-pit into a place where past secrets and guilts are indecently exposed.
Da Costa's play is full of echoes: not just of Ayckbourn but of Mike Leigh's fraught suburban comedies and Richard Bean's bed-based Honeymoon Suite. He also glibly disposes of a crucial character in a too-convenient offstage accident. But he has the priceless gift of wrenching laughter from the social embarrassment of long-severed relations. Funerals, he implies, bring out the worst in everyone, as Tony's wife launches into extended bad-taste jokes and his sister-in-law finds her pierced clitoris has become public knowledge. Even the mortician is pursuing a profitable sideline in cake-making.
Although da Costa himself cooks with familiar materials, he comes up with a tasty theatrical comedy. And his eye for inappropriate behaviour on solemn occasions is well served by Robin Lefevre's production.
David Horovitch's monumentally lugubrious Tony looks like a bloodhound left out too long in the rain. Alison Steadman as his wife gives her well-loved display of opulent coarseness. And Jason Durr captures the smooth duplicity of the lascivious Louis. But the sharpest performance comes from Lynda Bellingham as Tony's immensely condescending sister-in-law: the moment when she furtively crosses her legs as people inquire where her wedding ring has gone brought tears to my eyes. Not the most original play; but an extremely funny one.
· Until February 19. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
