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TV chef Caroline Mortimer’s seemingly perfect life in a big house in Highgate is crashing down around her. She and her banker husband sleep in separate bedrooms, their Cambridge graduate son is determined to go to Syria and, now, she’s been papped by The Mail on Sunday face-planting, drunk, onto a pavement.
Playwright Torben Betts is often described as the heir to Alan Ayckbourn for his melding of social issues with domestic comedy. In ‘Monogamy’, designer James Perkins’s lavishly detailed kitchen set – a glossy, ‘House Beautiful’ double-page spread brought to life – becomes a battleground for twenty-first-century concerns.
So it’s a shame that ‘Monogamy’ could probably be retitled ‘Monotony’ at times. The consistent sharpness of Betts’s previous plays – such as ‘Invincible’, about the North/South divide – is missing. It’s slow to start and goes on too long. Characters have a tendency to drop clunky speeches about benefits cuts and disabled parents like pace-shattering bricks of social conscience.
Don’t get me wrong: Betts’s keen ear for shrill self-absorption is still present. There are lines that land like knives and son Leo, played to punchable perfection by Jack Archer, is a bracing sketch of how genuine grievance can happily coexist with sneery sanctimony.
But a late-entering Charlie Brooks (best known as the deliciously evil Janine on ‘EastEnders’) gets short shrift as Sally, wife of Caroline’s carpenter – and lover – Graeme. Her backstory is basically crammed into one monologue. It’s ironic that, generally, all of the characters from outside the house only really exist as critiques of those inside it.
As Caroline, Olivier Award winner Janie Dee gives us a sympathetic portrait of a woman repeatedly placed on – and then wrenched from – an impossible pedestal by everyone around her, while at the same time narcissistically clinging on to ingrained prejudices she's only dimly aware of.
The problem, though, is that Caroline epitomises the indecision of a play that can’t make up its mind about how ruthless it wants to be. You find yourself craving the moments when it really flashes its teeth and goes for the jugular.
The second half is an improvement because it embraces the potential for dark lunacy. As everyone staggers around, pissed, sloshing alcohol everywhere, director Alastair Whatley’s production finally ramps up to a much-needed farcical rhythm. It’s often carried by Patrick Ryecart, whose eye-bulging performance as golf-playing banker Mike is an unhinged delight.