![]() ![]() As the supposed guilty parents of Ferdinand Arion Bakare is every inch the alpha male lawyer, Dinita Gohil the vomiting shyer wife, a wifely worm who finally turns in fury. The quartet under Nicholai La Barrie get it generally right, body language and deadly-flat verbal knifings perfect, from the frigid politesses to the frankly pissed once the rum comes out. In 2006 it was early on the curve with a character’s constant intrusive phone calls and i wondered whether it would feel dated. It is a favourite play, polished and mean, Yasmina Reza deploying that magnificent French brutality about bourgeois behaviour, in a sharp translation by Christopher Hampton. Especially interesting when set aside Chichester’s childless, slightly younger foursome whose whole preoccupation is with their own identity troubles. ![]() Cue sexual, political, economic and protectively parental hostility. It’s a wonderful set by Lily Arnold, pinpoint sharp in its elegant chic middleclass minimalism with one nicely pretentious sculpture: better still, it is on an almost unnoticeably slow revolve, as the four are trapped, Huis-Clos style, in hellish circular oneupmanship and, selfrighteousness. That’s just the start, civilization’s red tooth and claws ever nearer the surface. And by his wife having a panic attack and vomiting on Veronica’s original Kokoschka catalogue. That is interrupted too often by Alan taking calls about the pharmaceutical company he lawyers for. So there is coffee and a home made clafoutis. Mutual tension must of course be muffled by social grace, so after an initial wary agreement to make the boys reconcile (or to put it Veronica’s way, make Ferdinand apologize, for his own moral good). Cue the first fault-line: perpetrator-parents object to the word “armed”, so it is grudgingly amended to “furnished”. Michael and Veronica’s 11 year old son Bruno has had his front teeth damaged in a scuffle with Alan and Annette’s son Ferdinand, armed with a bit of stick. This, which I caught in a late preview, is one I always like: any responsible schoolgate meeting in a nice if rather pretentious living-room. Two four-handers about awful middle class behaviour in a week: just what the irritable heatwave needed.
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