Degas as mentor

The Line
Arcola

The Priory
Royal Court

On to finer things at the Royal Court. The setting of Michael Wynne’s new play is so familiar it might have come out of a catalogue. Friends meet for a party and it all goes horribly wrong. Wynne’s brilliance is to focus on a neglected phase of life, the middle thirties, the years of the late-youth crisis when couples are forming, settling and nesting, and when singletons are starting to feel isolated, panicky, weird, half-mad, suicidal or religious.

Kate has been through a summer of losses (boyfriend, baby, mum) so to cheer herself up she hires a country folly and invites her best mates over for New Year’s Eve. But her buddies’ troubles merely compound her own. What a bunch. Ticking time bombs, the lot of them. Out-of-the-closet Daniel has fallen for a teenage boy on the internet. Ben’s new fiancée is a neurotic halfwit. Poisonous TV executive Rebecca is determined to conquer the world of children’s television, and after that the universe. Her hippie husband Carl, a failed actor-turned-shopkeeper, protests his undying love for his old flame Kate. It’s complex enough to have the misfitting sense of real life.

The top-notch cast is led by Jessica Hynes as Kate, a monument of stoic inadequacy. Rachael Stirling matches her for comic excellence as Rebecca, the rapacious executive fondly nicknamed ‘the axis of evil’ by her friends. Director Jeremy Herrin has done the script full justice and created a sprawling, warm-hearted festival of yuppie cattiness. It deserves five-star reviews all round but the early notices have been curiously stingy with their praise. (It probably doesn’t help that the only thick character is also working-class.) A play like this illustrates how the motives of critic and punter sometimes diverge. The punter wants a reward for his cash, he wants a laugh, a good night out. The critic is looking for social trends, moral lessons, challenged orthodoxies to discuss. He wants a play to be ‘about’ something. What’s this one about? It’s about a couple of hours. But it sets itself a simple goal, to entertain the crowd, and it scores with dazzling assurance. The last première I saw at the Royal Court’s main house was Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth (easily the best new play I’ve ever seen). Its first revival opens at the Apollo in the New Year. If this doesn’t join it in the West End I’ll eat a boiled stoat on Boxing Day.