Take one middle-class bedroom and one middle-aged, professional, urban, Pakeha couple, doing the various kinds of stuff you do in bedrooms over a chunk of time. Fancy making a lively full-length comedy (with a bit of drama mixed in) out of that, as Roger Hall has. Amazingly, it works.

Amazing, also, to realise that this play, which as the author’s programme note says, “went on to do very nicely thank you,” including morphing into a Pommie soap that went through two whole series, had its premiere production here at Centrepoint, back in 1990.

I can recall that production sufficiently to recognise that this one is a bit different, shifted to a later decade (there’s a cordless phone, from the beginning), and with a few changed bits of text. Roger Hall has a marvellously sure gift for nailing speech-modes and behaviour in ways that are amusing (sometimes quite funny) yet feel right, and the play does not feel dated.

Someone or other has said, too, that ninety percent of interpretation is in the casting. Being able to cast two such talented, skilled and experienced actors as Alison Quigan, as Jen, and Tim Bartlett, as Barry, is excellent, yet the director needs then to achieve a synergy with them, as to what they can best do. Doubtless, Kate Louise Elliott has here done so; and the timing and nuances and facial expressions are splendid.

With Tim Bartlett, especially, already manifestly middle-middle-aged, he does not seem to get significantly older; nor is there a very strong sense of a shifting power balance between the two, because right from the start he is a bit jaded vis-à-vis his career as a dentist, which remains same-old same-old, and his wife is already quite feisty, although she has not yet got very far in her law firm. So, the emphasis is rather on her developing an area of her life outside the marriage, among her lawyer colleagues, and Barry’s reaction to that, and on his own belated fling with a patient, and the consequences of Jen’s full discovery of that – which means there’s a good deal more happening in the second half than in the first.

Still, their one successful sexual congress, with both of them actually lying flat side- by-side, giving utterance to their thoughts and responses, is a very funny happening.

Offstage somewhere intermittently are their offspring (one of each), other family members, friends, a dog, a whole city (in this production it’s Palmy North), evoked in one way or another. Still, what the play comes back to is: how can two individual people with some spirit and differing interests go on living with each other, year after year after year? It’s not made too easy. 

Nicole Cosgrove’s set design is good looking and efficient, and her costume design is lively, with Jen especially having to make some quick offstage changes, especially as she moves more upmarket. Graham Slater’s lighting design is capable. Some ingenuity has clearly gone into the choice of songs played before and between episodes.

This is a very good and easily enjoyable production of a fine play. 
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