Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

Playwright Martin Crimp is back at the Orange Tree Theatre, which nurtured him and staged his first six plays before he became a Royal Court blue-eyed boy and went on to write prolifically – original plays, translations / adaptations and, more recently, opera librettos – and become our most ‘European’ of playwrights. This was the sixth of those early plays, a 1988 satire on middle class morals and patronising male behaviour.

Mike and Liz are selling their London home and Clair is their estate agent. They make a big deal about how they want to act honourably, but everything that follows contradicts this, including how they sanction gazumping, how they treat the Italian nanny and how they inadvertently expose Clair to much worse. It all takes place inside Fly Davis’ elevated gauze square, which becomes both Mike & Liz’s living room, Clair’s flat and finally Mike & Liz’s garden.

Surprisingly, and depressingly, the behaviours on show are as current as they were thirty years ago, but it didn’t have enough bite for me, a bit light in narrative and characterisation and, though well performed, Richard Twyman’s production didn’t have enough pace. I’m afraid it felt like a long 100 minutes.