Life x 3

National Theatre, London
***

Yasmina Reza's new play is an elegant enigma with triple variations. Like many dramatists before her, Reza is fascinated by alternative possibilities; and behind the 90-minute bourgeois comedy lies the suggestion that everyday life, like the universe itself, is made up of dark, invisible matter.

Reza offers three perspectives on a single situation. The core consists of married couple Henry and Sonia discovering important dinner guests, Hubert and Ines, arriving on the wrong night. Henry's professional world is also suddenly thrown into disarray: he learns from Hubert that a similar scientific paper to one he has long been writing - on the flatness of galaxy halos - is about to be published. The play's subtlety depends on the way all four characters react to social and scientific upheaval.

As an intellectual construct, the play is fascinating; the one flaw theatrically is that the temperature perceptibly drops after the riotous first scene. Nothing is funnier on stage than to see supposedly decorous people behaving badly; and Reza, in Christopher Hampton's superb translation, gives us a dinnerless party from hell. The hosts insult the guests, the guests insult each other and every attempt at conversation is punctuated by the cries of an unseen child. If farce can be defined as the worst day of your life, then this is a mini-classic of the genre.

Subsequent scenes refine Reza's argument. She shows that people who engage in cosmic research may be fuelled by petty rivalries and desires. Even more intriguingly, the one character who has no professional aspirations, Ines, is the one who most movingly expresses a belief in the significance of human life.

The actors precisely register their shifts in behaviour while suggesting they possess an irreducible personal core. Mark Rylance catches exactly Henry's intemperate volatility, as does Harriet Walter Sonia's inquisitive intelligence.

As the starving guests, Oliver Cotton perfectly conveys Hubert's comic arrogance and Imelda Staunton his wife's resistance to a lifetime's condescension.

Until January 16. Box office: 020-7452 3000.

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