The Civilisation Game

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Late at night and much to their surprise, a couple who have freshly moved in to a leafy Belfast estate host an impromptu housewarming. Guy (Eugene O’Hare) and Roisin (Alexandra Ford) decant cava into coffee mugs while jazz is played, cake is threatened, and overbearing neighbours Peter (Alan McKee) and Amanda (Cathy White) make politely scant reference to the couple’s state of undress – they’ve been trying for a baby – or their packing box clutter, or, indeed, the teenage burglar they’ve just apprehended, beaten unconscious and tied to a chair.

“What side are you on?” Roisin asks the materialistic Peter. “The side of justice and democracy,” he instinctively lies, but actually, she’s just asking about the street. Here, justice and democracy take the shape of a kangaroo court and periodic punishment beatings (nobody calls the cops), and, as the group’s tissue of middle-class morality is merrily shredded, it is them that Tim Loane’s new play is putting on trial.

Where Loane has previously used the exposure of farce to tear down moral superstructures and skewer Northern Irish politics, archly jabbing at the fears and prejudices of unionism in Caught Red Handed (2002) or republicanism in To Be Sure (2007), The Civilisation Game is pointedly free of sectarian watchwords. When Guy is revealed to be a coeliac, for instance, the wickedly funny Cathy White, dripping with liberal tolerance, agrees to “live and let live”. All such poses are undone by the dogged unmasking of Loane’s plotting, where Ryan McParland’s commendably understated, ambiguous hoodlum spins tales of working-class woe which sleuth out each character’s concealed turpitude.

Training his satirical cross-hairs on the professional classes hardly counts as big game for a writer as subversive as Loane, though. When farceurs from Molière to Ayckbourn have humiliated middle-class characters for the amusement of a middle-class audience, shooting fish in a barrel at least demands a more innovative design for the barrel. Like Stuart Marshall’s kitchen set, though, or James C McFetridge’s lights, Loane’s narrative is more concerned with being sleek and functional and, as director, he goes to pace-sapping lengths to see out the formula. So, each character is beaten down one by one and – as though fearing anything as bourgeois as a moral – Loane labours the point that no lessons have been learned. It’s a diverting game, he suggests, this pretence of society, and everybody loses.

Runs until May 26th