"Balham, gateway to the south," cried Peter Sellers in a famous spoof travelogue. In Kevin Elyot's haunting new play, the suburb offers a portal to Proust. While the piece is set mainly in south London, it consciously alludes to the Proustian themes of time, memory, loss and guilt.
Inevitably there are also echoes of Elyot's own most recent plays, My Night With Reg and The Day I Stood Still. His hero, Frank, is a gay playwright suffering a wasting illness, implicitly sexual, and haunted by guilt over some past action. That much is clear from Frank's very funny restaurant encounter with his coke-snorting doctor, who bemoans life's cruelty while avidly spotting celebrities. We then flash back in time to a get-together with Frank and his surrogate Balham family to learn the source of his shame.
It would be cruel to reveal the plot's mainspring. What strikes me is the way Elyot, like Frank, observes bourgeois rituals with a mixture of mordant satire and outsiderish envy. Frank's best friend, Laura, is married to a dullish dentist and dotes obsessively on her 15-year-old son, Phillip. There is even something Proustian about the husband's loneliness in the face of such passion and about Frank's own feelings for Phillip. The ache of unsatisfied longing is, however, combined with acerbic comedy, not least in the savage portrait of Laura's brother-in-law, a philistine, wine dealer who is married to an intense, Beowulf-studying interior designer.
In the end Elyot is dealing with the waywardness of passion: its ability to strike anywhere, any time between the most improbable couples. But he is also writing about the way it is filtered through memory and releases the artist's creativity. While he does this in a delicate, subtle, tightly written theatrical construct - only 90 minutes long - there are times when the play is too self-conscious for its own good. In particular, Frank's admission that he is constantly accused of dramatising his personal experience sounds suspiciously like a pre-emptive critical strike.
In fact, this play shows Elyot's writing has an incremental power: it echoes earlier themes while taking him forward into bourgeois family life. It is also beautifully directed by Ian Rickson.
If I had to highlight one moment it would be that in which Lindsay Duncan's sensually possessive Laura tangoes with Andrew McKay's Phillip: it is both quasi-incestuous and imbued with a larky gaiety. It also acquires extra poignancy as both Michael Maloney as the solitary Frank and Peter Wight as Laura's neglected husband gaze enviously on.
All four actors are excellent, but the fascination of Elyot's accomplished play is that it shows the London suburbs to be every bit as much filled with pain, passion and guilt as Proust's Paris or Combray.
Until March 10. Box office: 020-7565 5000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
