Jerwood Downstairs: The Priory

Forget luxury rehab: Michael Wynne's 30-something comedy made me feel like reaching for the booze and drugs: not because it's terrible (it isn't), but because when people who've lost the plot meet a writer who hasn't really provided one, their me-centric chat will bore you, unless you've had a hefty sprinkle of whatever they're having. The Priory that this metropolitan friendship group have decamped to is not the famous celeb detox destination, but a country house rental at New Year. But there's still plenty derangement and drug dependency lurking beneath the snarky rivalries.

Wynne's cautionary comedy of middle-class, mid-youth disappointment has a great cast and some acerbic caricatures of 30-something media types with more style than content. The mismatched friends are reunited at the behest of Kate (Jessica Hynes), a loopily well-intentioned struggling writer at the end of an annus horribilis (her book has been rejected, her boyfriend dumped her post-miscarriage for his pregnany mistress, and her Mum died). Her epiphany is that it's OK to fail: but the nightmare dinner party that provides the occasion for her conclusion is a farce weighed down by an indigestibly sluggish portion of miserablism.

The Court has struggled to programme a seasonal show which reflects its high artistic aspirations and though this new play is too well-observed and spikily performed to be pure Christmas turkey, it's neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. Joseph Millson excels as Kate's GBF Daniel. But Kate's friends,despite being embodied by the likes of Rupert Penry-Jones and the ever-excellent Rachael Stirling (a toxic couple with nothing in common except for their kids), seem contrived to ramp up the sheer awfulness of it all: the desperately over-friendly beautician whom one of them turns up engaged to (after a day's accquaintance) is the most random character, but it's hard to believe in the links between any of them . When disaster strikes in the second half it's equally contrived, but the pace and tension, seized upon by director Jeremy Herrin, show that awfulness is so much more dramatic when it's wielding an old-fashioned knife than when it's standing around boasting about its job in TV or bitching about its broken iPod.