If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet

Josie Rourke's Bush Theatre is on fighting form. The tiny west London home of new writing has a rep for punching above its weight. And Rourke's own feisty production of Nick Payne's new comedy about family and planetary meltdown is the third great premiere in a year that's been a political comedy triple knockout.

As in Steve Waters's dystopian double bill 'The Contingency Plan', which opened here in May, environmental disaster is the dark background lit up by comic sparks. And as in last month's portrait of Blair's Britain, Jack Thorne's '2nd May 1997', it's the actors who provide the gunpowder to ignite the script. Payne's oddball comedy is strongest when it leaves the soapbox and descends into the dysfunctional home of visionary environmentalist George, his uptight wife, Fiona, and their hapless daughter Anna, in whom the essential indignity of being a teenager is compounded by excess body fat and the fact that her mum is one of her schoolteachers. When her gloriously inappropriate uncle Terry explodes into designer Lucy Osborne's nifty blue-sky set (an azure bedsit where the furniture sports fluffy white clouds), the family fireworks begin.

Rafe Spall is irresistibly funny as feckless mockney charmer Terry: Terry's heart's in the right place but his shit-faced rants in praise of fat birds and his schemes for crapping on the doorstep of Anna's school bully make him an addictive but unsustainable role-model. Spall struts the walk and lisps up the talk like everyone's favourite fuckwit, in a comic performance that is very much his own, even though it's so snort-makingly familiar. As his older brother, George, too immersed in his magnum opus to notice how screwed up his family is, Michael Begley contributes six-and-a-half feet of tweedy, benevolent waffle: it's not his fault that Payne's tightest, brightest writing goes to Terry. As George's daughter Anna, Ailish O'Connor conveys a mute agony that reveals the neglected truth behind these wacky and touching shenanigans. Payne's characters show us how we're all too wound up in our own struggles to change the world and, although it fails really to dramatise its sound environmental politics, it's got plenty of combustible comedy and essential human kindness in its favour.