The Royal Court's Ian Rickson could probably stage the telephone directory and make it seem meaningful. And there were times during Kevin Elyot's self-consciously Proustian play about lots of unhappy middle-class people when I rather wished he had.
Things begin intriguingly. A mute woman, Laura (Lindsay Duncan), eyes blinded by dark glasses, sits across a table from Frank (Michael Maloney), an unsuccessful fringe playwright suffering from Aids and wearing an eye patch. A sliver of sunlight cuts down the centre of the stage but these two figures remain untouched, unseeing.
Over the next 90 minutes we find out why, as a memory play unfolds. It centres round a party during which something so terrible happens that it leaves no one present untouched by guilt. All the same, Frank hopes to revive his flagging career by writing a play about it.
Elyot's play reveals multiple betrayals of friendship, brotherhood, marriage and the relationships between adults and children. It is a play in which lust is confused with love and the act of life-giving is warped. Laura has a son she cannot let go of, while Frank claims to have saved his life by giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Often it is all too slick and calculated, both heavily plotted and unconvincing. The characters move about the stage like mournful snails, leaving trails of melancholy; emotions are prettified by being overlaid with Bach. You are not moved or discomforted by tragedy, merely entertained. The play is as slight as a piece of gossip.
There is one absolutely true moment. Mother and son argue and storm off; the son returns and makes his mother dance the tango with him, her stiff, reluctant limbs gradually melting into his. It is like a lovers' quarrel resolved: affecting, moving, discomfortingly erotic.
There is no fault with the acting, which has a remarkable purity and intensity. Maloney finds the lonely, island heart of Frank and Duncan mines the deep well of discontent in Laura, a woman whose aggressive wit turns to glottal despair as she runs out of air.
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