Lying Kind

Black comedies don't come much blacker, or funnier, than The Lying Kind, a hugely welcome blast of seasonal ill-cheer set on Christmas Eve that piles on the preposterousness as it escalates the laughter.

Anthony Neilson - a highly regarded fringe writer of the bleaker, brutal recesses of human nature like the disturbing Stitching, recently seen at the Bush - has corralled his dark sensibility into a rollicking Royal Court commercial comedy that finally finds him on the main stage for the first time. The result is as if Joe Orton had been reincarnated, seen a Ray Cooney farce and decided to write a cross between the two, combining Orton-like jokes with Cooney-like structure.

A pair of blunderingly ineffectual police constables (Thomas Fisher and Darrell D'Silva) arrive at Number 58 with some terrible news to impart: the occupants' (Sheila Burrell and Patrick Godfrey) 34-year-old daughter Carol has been killed in a motorway accident on her way to celebrate Christmas with them. Neither is very happy at the prospect, though as one tells the other, "Being a policeman can't be just moving on buskers or exchanging friendly banter with the Countryside Alliance. There's bound to be some bad bits too".

They're just about to discover how bad, as their reluctance to share the truth leads to a round of cover-up and subterfuge, and involves everything from a paedophile lynching mob (led by Alison Newman's Gronya) and an apparently cross-dressing vicar (Matthew Pidgeon) to senile dementia, heart attacks and a dead dog.

Neilson maintains a steady grasp on the spiralling chaos and crossed-purposes in his own appealingly acted production. Wisely dispensing with an interval, it's played at full throttle across 100 continuous minutes. It may not be to everyone's comic taste, but for those looking for an antidote to relentless Christmas cheer, it might be just the kind of alternative festive fun you need.

- Mark Shenton