(seen at the afternoon performance on 27th September 2023)
Back in 2008, “helicopter” and “tiger mother” parenting were all the rage, Super Nanny was putting parents on the naughty step and children were (from the perspective of those with a 1970s childhood anyway) being cossetted and protected as never before – even as the young parents appeared to be losing all sense of proportion and common sense.
Hence Yasmina Reza’s play was a West End hit, dealing as it does with two sets of parents meeting to discuss just why a boy equipped with a stick used it to damage the dental work of his playmate.
Over an uninterrupted 90 minutes we learn that one boy wouldn’t let the other into his gang, that harsh words may constitute assault and that adults can and will descend to childhood levels of behaviour given the motive, means and opportunity.
Lily Arnold gives us a very comfortable disc home full of ethnic Objet d'art, revolving at a steady millimetre per second, with descending lights behind. The effect is gladiatorial arena and director Nicholai La Barrie attempts to make the most of it.
His actors prowl the perimeters of sofas and tables, backs arching and hackles rising just when tempers seem to be cooling. Each has their flare ups and flashes of angry revelation.
Martin Hutson’s Michael is a saucepan salesman with politics hidden from right-on author wife Veronica (Freema Agyeman).
Theirs is a pairing of diverging minds proving opposites attract, and a study in the change children bring to a relationship dynamic.
Agyeman raises constantly the question of whom she is really trying to attack – the child who injured her boy, or the boy she is married to whose practical front belies a twisted outlook and impractical approach at odds with her own.
Couple Alan and Annette Raleigh (Ariyon Bakare and Dinita Gohil) are even less in accord. His lawyer persona and her wealth manager are the professionals, oddly cold unless self-interest is raised. We wonder if it is their child they are defending or simply a principle that their professional status should protect them from all this.
The quartet do well to keep the playing energy high and the acting speed rarely falters. The problem is that this monkey’s attention sometimes did.
Nothing much really happens from the quite promising start. The core question of what both couples want from the meeting is never satisfactorily resolved.
The malfunctioning drug sub-plot feels grafted on, the vomiting by an adult inexplicably messy and without any credibility as well as killing the dramatic flow and revolting most of the audience.
Translator Christopher Hampton may well have caught the sense of Reza’s original French, but he cannot transpose to more recent times where such matters would doubtless be dealt with in chatrooms, via lawyers and with the intervention of school and child protection teams.
Life has moved on and we have perhaps become a society beyond this simple satire. As with this play, the monkey feels a strong case for making of that thought what you will, for it is the one this microscopic take on God's carnage left it with.
2 stars.