Very much a play in two halves, Richard Greenberg's script about two generations of wealthy NYC thirty- somethings - with all that laconic, glinting dialogue - is a natural vehicle for Rough Magic in their first new production this year. It's a cerebral, hyperliterate riff, really, on the meanness and competition that can exist among lifelong friends.
In the first act, three characters narrate their way into our consciousnesses. Walker is a preposterous, spiteful aesthete who constantly emits quasi-Wildean epigrams. His elder sister, Nan, a seemingly fulfilled mother-of-three, tracks him to his dingy Manhattan loft a year after the death of their father, a millionaire architect.
Then there's Pip, son of their father's best friend and late business partner, and a long-adopted part of the family. All hell breaks loose when it transpires that he has inherited the Long Island house that made their fathers famous.
This first act is virtually a set-piece on its own, and Lynne Parker's direction has both style and considerable substance as she divines the unfinished nuances of caution, dishonesty, sexuality. The pacing is exquisite as, playing in the three-quarter round, the actors nervously circle each other on Brien Vahey's vast, open, wood-frame set.
Anne Byrne's Nan is all pursed disapproval, yet thaws generously when moved to memory by Pip. Peter Hanley is a mix of chilly, impetuous dissembling and damaged self-obsession while, as Pip the impossibly well-adjusted TV actor, Darragh Kelly is a real tonic with his comic, heart-warming cascade of tension-puncturing revelations.
The second act lurches back to the 1960s, with the same actors now playing their parents at even younger ages, in the same loft. It's an initially befuddling conceit that seems to explore how unfinished business can pass down generations, or maybe it's just a device. The structure certainly seems unwieldy; nor do the company clamber down convincingly from the glittering dialogue into the sudden physical intimacy.
The overall effect is very much on the head rather than the heart, and the up-ended conceit of a structure (a tough one to play) becomes mired in the endless, leaden thespian citations, from Oedipus to Hedda Gabler - a self-referential world into which uncomfortable emotions intrude, yet are never quite captured.
Until December 16. Box office: 00 3531 679 6622.
