Photo: Tristram Kenton
Sometimes the sheer brio of the writing and performing makes up for the familiarity of the subject; such is the case with Amelia Bullmore's first play, which is an invigorating kitchen comedy about the perils of monogamy. After a bout of semi-abstract, doomladen plays, it is refreshing to find one that has a proximity to recognisable life.
Bullmore starts by showing a harassed mum, Jane, coping with two demanding children; what makes it funny is that the kids are played by stamping, shouting, rampaging adults. Jane's world is blown apart when her husband, Kev, returns from one of his business trips as a building safety inspector to announce that he's smitten with a member of his team. And right in the midst of domestic crisis, in comes Kev's oldest chum, Phil, a bachelor Scot whose relationship with a doolally handbag designer, Lorna, seems to possess the jazzy fervour hard to sustain in a 12-year-old marriage.
We have been here before, but Bullmore refreshes a stock situation by her sharp eye and ear for the oddities of human behaviour. Jane is not just a boxed-in mum but a woman driven to hit her kids out of desperation. Lorna is a beautifully observed study in glamorous narcissism who, in describing an unrequited love affair, announces, "I lived off apples for a year." And the kids, forever asking embarrassing questions about mortality and hairy fannies, are hilariously inquisitive.
The play suffers from a clumsily contrived ending but Bullmore writes with clinical accuracy about the conflict between marriage and our mammalian urges. And, having just directed Laura Wade's stylised study of confinement in Breathing Corpses, Anna Mackmin here shows she's equally at home with domestic realism. She even retains from the previous show Niamh Cusack, whose Jane has a devastated anguish that cuts through the comedy.
Nancy Carroll wittily plays Lorna like a sexy Anglepoise lamp, while Daniel Ryan as the errant Kev and Mark Bonnar as the free-floating Phil are very good as the floundering males. But it is Helena Lymbery and Jane Hazlegrove who all but steal the show as the two kids who want kisses and cuddles on demand but regard the house as their territory in which the adults just happen to live. As a report from the front line of the domestic battleground, Bullmore's play bulges with promise.
· Until May 7. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
