Timing is everything. Eleven years ago Debbie Isitt's gruesome charade was a popular hit, but feminism, both in theatre and life, has moved on since then and Isitt's "all men are shits" line of attack now seems extravagantly dated.
Isitt certainly doesn't pull her punches. Her heroine, Hilary, announces straight off that "I first decided to cook my husband on the day he left me". To that end she arranges a Thyestean feast for ex-hubby Kenneth and his new wife Laura. But before supper can be served we backtrack to see what led to such drastic action.
We see the lies that accompany Ken's cheating on stately, plump Hilary with taut, nimble Laura. But we also learn that, while Hilary is a fantastic cook, Laura is a culinary innocent. So Ken tries to have it both ways, getting his oats with Laura and his dinner with Hilary, which is what causes his ultimate downfall. I don't mind being told men are monsters and women are entitled to revenge. What irks me is Isitt's strip-cartoon approach to a serious subject.
For a start, Ken is such a selfish, boorish slob that it beggars belief that Hilary would have married him, or Laura would have looked at him: I suspect any man who told his lover, in mid-congress, "As soon as I've finished this I'll have to go", would be thrown out on his ear or some other part of his anatomy.
And not surprisingly the audience pantomime-hisses Ken when he tells his wife that she's a fat, boring houswife: what Isitt doesn't seem to grasp is that by painting Ken as a rank villain she demeans the woman once drawn to him.
All evening I kept thinking how other writers have handled similar themes. Ayckbourn shows it is the well intentioned who are the real destroyers. Mike Leigh's domestic dramas provide a wealth of social detail. And only last week Phyllis Nagy in Trip's Cinch reminded us of the difficulty of establishing the truth about any male-female relationship. But Isitt's play is merely a reverse Punch and Judy show that tricks out its simplistic message with Rossini overtures and old pop songs.
Fortunately Alison Steadman lends Hilary her own brand of comic bravura and Daisy Donovan also fits the bill as the trimly appetising Laura, but Michael Attwell can do little with the sweating stooge that is Ken.
By the end I was reminded that, although Bacon admitted that there is a wild justice in revenge, he went on to say that "vindictive persons live the life of witches"; and all we are offered here is a kind of mad hags' sabbath.
· Until December 7. Box office: 020-7369 1761.
