16 – 26 February

I’m conscious, writing this as a dark cloud lours above our heads, that much of what we get to see in the theatre concerns the relatively modest and to some, privileged, trials of middle class western life. In particular the, ‘boomer generation’, that saw unprecedented freedoms, social, financial and sexual, are waking up to the fact that it is sadly not true that ‘plus ca change’. We are all the leading players in our own life stories and even comfortable lives have vicissitudes that, irrespective of the world around us, need to be confronted and fixed.

Be there more or less than seven ages we all face the prospect of retirement and the waning of sexual appetite. When the children have flown what lies before us? This is the chasm that Laura (Janie Dee) imagines to have opened up before her as she and husband, Peter (Griff Rhys Jones) prepare to set out to dinner with Peter’s business partner, Roger. However it’s not just any dinner, it’s a clincher since Roger has agreed to buy out Peter’s share of their partnership for a substantial sum which will set the couple up for life. The dinner is a signing that will secure their future. However with Peter’s hand on the doorknob ready to leave, their relationship suffers a kind of hernia as the inner becomes outer and the emotional landscape of their past is examined in what is a kind of emergency rescue.

Originally a French play by Gérald Sibleyras and Jean Dell, this adaption by Belinda Lang who also directs, is set in comfortable West London suburbia. Being a light comedy of sexual manners it nevertheless touches on real concerns. Ms Dee is perfect as the wife determined not to be a cipher as she confronts one of the staging posts of life. There is a determination in her character that will not be denied. Griff Rhys Jones is an ideal foil. Actors have idiosyncratic gifts and his is the ability to handle weighty issues with a light touch. The youngster in his soul is never far away and pops up to lighten the mood with a little shake of the head and a wiggle of the fingers. His Peter is in a permanent sate of amused perplexity, anxious to get to the dinner whilst resignedly solicitous of his wife’s looming mental crisis.

It is a one act play, being supposedly the hour and a half that it takes to sort their marriage and future. The first part has much to-ing and fro-ing around the imminent exit some of which became somewhat repetitive and the play does not really get going until they rake over the past and start to plot a way forward. The erotic possibilities of a squeaky floorboard show the writers and actors in full comic mode, whilst the biggest laugh of the evening involved mayonnaise.

Ms Lang’s direction is finely tuned to the eddies and flows, the petty irritations of a longstanding relationship and she deftly manages the arc of the play to its satisfying conclusion.

★★★☆☆ Graham Wyles 24th February

photo Marc Brenner