This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch up at a Welsh cottage for a relaxing weekend away from the kiddies. Trouble erupts instantly. Keith and Briony bicker over the milk that the swollen-breasted Briony has to express into plastic bottles. Keith secretly craves his wife’s ‘liquid love’ and he tiptoes around the cottage trying to glug it back without being spotted by the others.
Ross and Rosy arrive. They’re an achingly smug yuppie twosome. They finish each other’s sentences. They tee up each other’s anecdotes. They stand in the kitchen entwined in each other’s arms and gaze out at their friends like kittens on a Christmas card. They are, of course, keeping a stack of marital problems hidden from view.
Upper-class Charles and Serena got invited by accident. They’re loud, they’re rich, they’re armed and they’re hungry. Charles nips outside and bags a brace of partridge, which he dumps in the lap of vegetarian Briony. More madcap figures appear. A Welsh farmer stalks the cottage with a shotgun, convinced that the three English couples are about to start an orgy that will corrupt his only son. A drug-addled teenage sexpot arrives and after flashing her breasts at Ross she accuses him of molesting her.
The escalations of character and incident are handled with great assurance by Paisley Day, who happens to be a superb comic actor and who has evidently learned his craft from within. But what’s unusual here is that the play explicitly grades the three levels of our class system. Briony and Keith get zero points for being pea-brained, aitch-dropping estuarial numpties. Ross and Rosy are marked down for adopting crass bourgeois prejudices but they earn points for their attractive clothes, posh syntax and decent salaries.
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