Amongst Friends

The trouble with Patrick Connellan’s design for April de Angelis’ new play is that it’s too much, and too noisy. Every time someone takes a step on the wooden parquet floor, the noise reverberates like a BBC radio sound effect, and as Helen Baxendale as Lara is wearing killer high heels, you also start to worry about how many holes she might be making on her own terrain.

But that’s only half of it. Lara, a tabloid journalist, lives in a South London gated community with her ex-MP novelist husband Richard (Aden Gillett), literally walled in by huge piles of brick. Through them, we can see a vast illuminated cityscape, like the ones you see in CSI New York as establishing shots. A blue lift goes up and down at the side.

I think we get the message that these people have cut themselves off, but the point is extravagantly made: how much do they have to spend on these Hampstead sets? There’s more money flying around on hardware than there is time spent on the script, which is jerkily unsatisfactory and wearingly unfunny. The entry-phone gag is fairly good the first time round.

But that malfunction allows the plot device of “the uninvited guest” Shelley (Vicky Pepperdine) to barge in and shake up the dinner party. Lara and Richard have invited round former neighbours Joe (James Dreyfus, nicely rumpled, playing against type) and Caitlin (Emma Cunniffe); he’s a drugs counsellor, she’s a nurse with a book out on breasts.

Shelley ostensibly comes with the food delivery – African dishes served in leaves – but also acts as a catalyst in a series of revelations and confessions among these fractured friends. She herself has a son who’s died in Basra, or he might have done, while Lara supported the war in the column and Richard is held responsible for supplying inadequate military equipment.

At the same time, Richard is nurturing the embers of his affair with Caitlin, while Joe is driven to drastic, more tragic action. You can see where de Angelis is going: it’s a J B Priestley set-up with satirical remarks about lifestyle (there’s even a lumpy reference to MPs’ expenses that must have been pitched in last week) but it’s hard to get very involved and Anthony Clark’s production never really turns the screw.

– Michael Coveney