Late Company, Trafalgar Studios - this play is unapologetically conventional but utterly transfixing - review

Debora and Michael – she an artist, he a Conservative politician – have invited Curtis, the teenage friend of their high-school son Joel, and his parents round for dinner. There is an extra seat – for Joel, who killed himself following a spate of bullying at school. His grief-riven mum and dad want some answers from Curtis, who admits to having taunted Joel at school and posting mocking comments under his YouTube videos. Can an evening of open dialogue in the spirit of mutual healing bring about closure?

Of course not. One of the clever aspects of Tannahill’s play is the way it exposes the carapace of modern social rituals. The dinner table, with its artful flower arrangements, is the archetypal symbol of middle-class civility. But it’s clear, as Lucy Robinson’s regal, immaculately turned out Debora rearranges the napkins seconds before her guests arrives, it’s also a sacrificial altar. The polite chatter round the table may, initially at least, make ostensibly well-intentioned overtures towards reconciliation, but the feelings beneath are animal like: huge, furious and mad with pain. 

This fast-moving, 75-minute nightmare deftly folds in a variety of issues. There is a touch of ancient Greek drama in the way it interrogates ideas of justice, forgiveness and revenge. There are strong class tensions, too, in the barely disguised contempt Debora has for the less-cultured Tamara and in the way Bill and Michael lock horns – Bill, a bullying, unreconstructed plain speaker who thinks kids these days are cosseted; Michael a less knowable, more slippery operator who admits he and Debora may have over-pathologised Joel’s depression. And there is Joel himself, a conflicted adolescent who found only on the internet a platform to be himself and who, it transpires, was almost as much misunderstood by his parents as he was his peers. 

Best of all, Tannahill’s writing fizzes with authenticity. His arrow sharp dialogue is by turns comic and excruciating. In a quintet of impeccable performances, Lisa Stevenson as the twittering Tamara beautifully betrays the nervousness of a woman socially out of her depth while David Leopold’s fabulously sullen Curtis becomes, in a perhaps expected but no less welcome move, the evening’s redemptive force. Tannahill’s play, written when he was only 23, may be unapologetically conventional but in the way it picks apart our misguided hunger for easy resolutions, it’s utterly transfixing. 

Until Sep 16. Tickets: 0844 871 7615; atgtickets.com