MB Civic

This sounds like great theatre. Having originated in the US many of you have probably seen it. I am certainly gojng to try and take it in next time I am back in Blighty. Al B.

Charles Spencer reviews The Pain and the Itch at the Royal Court Theatre

Dominic Cooke’s week
When Dominic Cooke took over as artistic director of the Royal Court this year, he promised to reflect the theatre’s predominantly middle-class audience back to itself. For a venue best known for gritty, in-your-face, kitchen-sink drama, this was a revolutionary manifesto.

Wince-making comedy combines with questions of moral responsibility in The Pain and the Itch

And in the first play he has chosen to direct himself, Cooke has hit upon a brilliantly satirical piece that gleefully skewers the values of the impeccably liberal rich.

There is, however, some comfort for those who fret about world poverty and global warming while buying designer clothes in Sloane Street and flying to Barbados for their holidays. The play is American, which will give English viewers a chance to say: “Well, of course, we are nothing like as bad as that.”

I suspect even rich, Democrat American theatregoers let themselves off the hook a little when the play was premièred in Chicago in 2004, for at times Bruce Norris’s satire is just a little too broad and judgmental for the play’s own good.

But the writing is so entertaining and the structuring of the plot, which has something of the old-fashioned whodunnit about it, so skilful that I’m prepared to forgive the occasional heavy-handedness.

Clay and Kelly live in a luxurious home with their cute young daughter and their new baby son. Kelly has a well-paid office job, so Clay has become a doting house-husband, and this apparently enviable couple have invited the rest of the family for Thanksgiving.

Everything goes gloriously wrong. It’s clear that Clay can’t abide his cynical plastic surgeon of a brother, Cash, and the golden couple also look down on Cash’s glamour puss of an East European girlfriend who has alarmingly non-PC views on everything from gipsies (kill them) to smoking (best done in front of the kiddies).

The horror they evince when Kalina starts playing war games with their little girl is a joy for ever.

But matters go from bad to worse. Some unidentified creature is leaving bite marks in the avocado pears and, when Clay’s mother discovers that her granddaughter has a vaginal infection, child abuse is suspected.

And just who is the patient, grieving Muslim visitor Mr Hadid (Abdi Gouhad), who interrupts the Thanksgiving scenes with courteous questions about the family’s wealth?

I don’t want to give too much away, but at its best the play comes over like an ingenious mixture of Abigail’s Party and An Inspector Calls, as the wince-making comedy of social embarrassment gives way to more serious questions of moral responsibility.

Cooke directs a superbly acted production with the confidence of a man who knows he is on to a winner, while Robert Innes Hopkins’s elegant design reeks of money and minimalist good taste.

Sara Stewart brilliantly captures the cold steel that underlies the caring, socially concerned façade of Kelly, while Matthew Macfadyen hilariously and poignantly suggests the bitter sense of emasculation of her husband.

Andrea Riseborough offers a delicious comic turn as the boozy East European who actually knows the cruelty of the world at first hand, and there is strong support from Peter Sullivan and Amanda Boxer.

This is a terrifically entertaining, sometimes disturbing play that asks uncomfortable questions about the way the West lives now.