There is always an extra frisson hovering over the opening of a new work and a commissioned one at that. Has the faith been justified? Is the territory fresh (please, O please)? Are we provoked? Entertained? Both?

Carl Nixon is a versatile writer, well positioned to meet all such challenges. He is comfortably observant in this play, structuring a neat exploration of contemporary middle class parenthood with exhilarating gusto, covering 25 years of family and friendship, careers and complications in a series of male birthday occasions.

Two couples, best and oldest friends, are at the centre of things. One pair faces the hectic joy, recurring frustration and occasional weariness of raising three boys (including twins). The other chooses the lesser gamble, perhaps, of full on careers and each other. It is the impact of the offspring that shapes  relationships over the years, inevitably changing the trajectory of lives leaving less and less shared experience to celebrate.

Steven Ray’s direction maintains the balance between our insights into the two life styles very successfully.

Unclouded joy prevails at the first. It is David Williams’ 40th and all is right in his world. To cap it off, he and his wife Kathy, an author on the rise, announce to their best friends Stuart Marshall and Elizabeth Marshall- Clarke, that the next generation is on its way. Ecstatic determination that the "baby will fit in" finds a knowing response from the audience. As so often happens, the grandmother steps in to keep the domestic scene intact, but bringing too another decided voice, another complication. 

Little by little, tensions build up. From the perspective of the onlooker they are mostly deliciously funny. Basically well intentioned and rational human beings find themselves behaving and speaking in desperate ways. Some of the best moments of the play ignite when people are trying to say the right thing but inadvertently choose the worst. The audience is constantly amused and sometimes startled as a seemingly innocuous remark triggers a flare of resentment or anger.

Thus the years rattle by, pace flagging a little before the breather of the interval (too much talking), but picking up again in the second half as lives unravel and the implications of choice arrive  before us.

Physically, the characters seem to age very little, considering the pressure of their lives, but all five  roles are securely handled and warmly received. Judie Douglas, with her experienced talent, finds unexpected dignity as the grandmother, given the inanity of most of her lines and underscores the importance of that extended family notion. Her restrained disapproval of Stu, played with cocky verve by Tim Bartlett, is matched by his determination to "lighten things up".

The two younger women are well contrasted in script and performance. As Elizabeth, successful lawyer, clear in her no-child policy, Rima Te Wiata crosses the bridges between comedy and seriousness with ease. Sandra Rasmussen gives us a Kathy who develops from starry eyed first time mother to multi-media authorial success without missing a beat.

In the David Williams role, the main focus of the play, Ross Gumbley fleshes out the comedic opportunities with warmly human detail, so that by the end of the play, when he and Stu encounter each other at a futuristic Heathrow airport, there is real significance in his words and demeanour.

It is an urbane play, about people who have the choices of city professionals. They holiday in Rarotonga rather than at a bach somewhere. It is probably appropriate then, that the perspectived set, designed by David Thornley, is a clean, sophisticated space, adaptable for this time and circumstance or that. The world revealed beyond the constant living space is created with wonderfully effective technology.

The messy world of the child however, is always out of sight, apart from some baby gear early on, whose main function is to entangle the legs of a desperate dad on his way to answer the door. Child art work marking the passing years is a cleaned up version on an impeccable wall.

The effect of all this is to focus us squarely on the interaction of characters as they deal with life and each other. Parenthood, like old age, is not for sissies. Best to laugh, really. Stephen Sondheim is not the only one to have insisted "It’s the little things…"  

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