Two hours of bickering from a couple of doughnut-shaped crybabies: Middle, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining Cockney, Maggie, telling her City whizzkid husband Gary that their relationship is over. Gary and Maggie are aspriring underclass types who’ve achieved bourgeois prosperity: John Lewis kitchen, vintage wine rack and a ceramics collection. They have an eight-year-old daughter at a private school where she learns ballet steps and the piano instead of watching road-rage videos on YouTube like a council-house kid. She’s called Annabelle, by the way, and one wonders if Gary and Maggie style themselves ‘Garfield and Margaret’ at the school gate.

The writer, being male, portrays Garfield as a sweet, innocent toiler whose only sin is to neglect the selfish, hard-hearted Margaret. After starting a drippy friendship with a policeman – ‘we kissed’ – Margaret decides to destroy her marriage without a thought for the emotional damage this will inflict on her child. If she were a svelte, witty charmer she might attract our sympathy for rejecting her dull but reliable oaf of a husband but she’s a champion misery guts who hasn’t washed her hair since Theresa May was home secretary and who slobs around the kitchen in a nylon bed-coat that would look too cheap for the set of Mrs Brown’s Boys. She’s snobbish as well and she reminds Garfield that she has a degree and listens to Radio 4. He retaliates by posing as an avid reader whose books include My Story by Steven Gerrard. That quip is aimed at the NT’s snooty prole watchers who’d find it amusing to see a barrow boy equating a sportsman’s memoir with literature.

The couple’s finances are a puzzle. They have two incomes and they own a six-bedroom house in London but when Margaret visits Crouch End she breaks down in tears because she can’t afford a skirt from a yummy-mummy shop.