Generous

Canadian playwright Michael Healey's comedy about the complicated ethical underpinnings of do-gooding gets off to a distinctly unpromising start. The governing political party is in meltdown: all is chaos as one female MP is murdered and another is about to die. Eleanor Rhode's ultimately compelling staging is initially overheated and unfocused, and the comparatively uninventive bad language and threats of violence feel distinctly sub-'The Thick of It'.

But we next find ourselves in the office of Jane Perry's Julia, a magnificently pugnacious and self-serving oil CEO who juggles lovers, husbands and prime ministers with the casual aplomb of a to-the-manor-born circus performer. Here, Healey's freewheeling, exuberantly loquacious drama begins to cast its spell. The magnetically monstrous Julia can't help revealing and deconstructing her none-too-scrupulous motives even as she's sitting face to face with a journalist who has been commissioned to write a profile about her.
The truth keeps bubbling up out of Richard Beanland's beamingly talkative legal clerk Alex, too, as he analyses the sequence of events that has brought him into the bed of older woman Maria, who happens to be the mother of his former girlfriend Lily. The young lover, with his unsparing insights into human impulses, is both gauche and irrepressibly charming.

'Generous' is imperfect: there's that awkward first scene, and the Lily strand, especially a fight over a KFC bucket, never quite weaves itself credibly into the larger narrative. But the dialogue and performances in this constantly surprising dramatic investigation into benevolence (think Neil LaBute, only warmer and funnier) are as good as anything you'll find in the West End.