"You have no idea what it means to be single these days," Jill tells her new friend, Fifi, who is dressed up like a Christmas-tree fairy. Jill refers to a man she doesn't know smearing her all over with Vaseline - he brings a vat of the stuff to their first date - and the fact that she let him do it. Fifi has other things on her mind, though, having just found out that she's pregnant with twins and that they are due the next day.
This is a typical exchange in John Patrick Shanley's play about thirtysomething angst. Sound like a well-trodden path? Well, Shanley goes off the beaten track and then some to produce an oddball charmer - like Friends set in a self-help manual on acid. The plot is incidental, but colourful: Fifi and her husband, Oscar, a circus knife-thrower, come to terms with impending parenthood; Jill meets Oscar's friend Austen, whose mission in life is to make sad women happy. He wipes the Vaseline away in a moment of kooky delight - Jill in a full tub of water, Dean Martin on the stereo (operated by a rubber duck) and a pair of maracas on the go.
But beneath the surface strangeness this is a meaning-of-life drama at a time when all of us are saturated with advice on how to find that meaning. It is angst as only the post-therapy generation can do it - each character introduces themselves by talking about the dysfunction in their family background, the lack of love, the excess of it. "Let me tell you about me," says Omar, speaking for them all. Whether the play is ultimately a surreal parody of this culture - and there are some terrifically funny moments - or another aspect of it isn't really clear.
Austen speaks directly to the audience at the end, naked and holding a mirror for us to see ourselves anew in. He's full of empowering lines about feeling the big funk, the big fear, and doing it anyway.
This deadly serious mood is undermined by the glorious psychedelia of the set, the great lines ("I feel like I've been through the scumbag Olympics"), some sparkling performances (especially Selina Boyack as Jill, edgy and greasy at the same time), and the glorious self-help-speak of a dinner-party scene.
It turns out Jill likes having grease smeared on her because her father used to put butter on her nose at the dinner table. "Grease is not love," Austen tells her, as if it's a mantra she can take with her. There is one for all of us here in this strange, rather lovely, and gently funky play.
Until March 23. Box office: 0901 022 0300.
