Classics of the future

Games for Lovers feels like a smart, sexy TV comedy. Martha is still in love with her old flame Logan whose new girlfriend has a huge libido which he can’t hope to satisfy. When Martha starts flat-hunting she answers an advert coincidentally posted by Logan’s best friend, Darren. Thus, perhaps too neatly, the two warring couples are set up for a massive falling out.

Darren (played brilliantly by Billy Postlethwaite, with shades of Kevin Kline) is the beating heart of this story. He’s a former nerd who works as a City analyst and uses tricks learned from the internet to bed women. But all his techniques backfire and he becomes the victim of his botched seductions. Behind the cocky exterior, he’s just a sweet, shy, lonely youngster trying to keep his spirits afloat while he looks for the girl of his dreams. Drawn to the sexy Martha, he appoints himself as her love-supervisor and orders her to use his infallible methods to seduce a work colleague. Disaster follows. Their teaching sessions bring them closer together and as Logan’s passion for his red-hot lover starts to cool, the tensions escalate. Will Logan reclaim Martha before Darren makes his move? The plotline is predictable but the show grips because the writer, Ryan Craig, knows exactly what makes his characters tick, and fight, and he winkles out comic gold from the tiniest details. Some of the swerves made by the story are not just hilarious but dramatically penetrating. A scene involving a cruel falsehood brings the rival women together in a thrilling exchange of tense, angry dialogue.

The fluency of Anthony Banks’s production is marred by the cramped playing area at the Vaults. Two deep blocks of seats overlook a smallish stage which obliges the actors to swivel first this way, and then that, to get their lines across.