The darkly comic disintegration of marriage

Great night out: With your single friends

Recommend to friends? If you like oodles of black comedy with your marital infidelity, you'll love it

Best bit: The meeting between Eleanor, James and Kate. Oo-er missus

Morning after effect: Being put off the idea of marriage

In previews until 7 May 2013

At somes touching, but mostly blackly comic, Passion Play examines the breakdown of a supposedly stable marriage of two middle-aged profressionals, Eleanor (Zoe Wanamaker)and James (Owen Teale) when young temptress Kate (Annabel Scholey) enters their lives. Throw into the mix both James and Eleanor’s “alter-egos” (“Jim” is played with tortured gusto by Oliver Cotton; “Nell” is played with sharp sarcasm by Samantha Bond) and you have various dialogues happening simultaneously, contrasting feeble excuses from the characters with their “real thoughts”. Notably, Kate does not have an alter-ego; she is a purely hedonistic and sexual creature, uninhibited by morals or commitment, and ironically, the only character in the play who is truly free to be themselves.

The play examines whether or not Eleanor and James were ever truly in love; now that their adult children have flown the nest; they both work at home and have fallen into a pattern of familiar companionship. But all is not as it seems; whilst James is tortured by his desire for his younger colleague, Eleanor is also battling with an old indiscretion which weighs upon her conscience.

It all culminates when a certain love letter is intercepted by Eleanor’s jilted friend Agnes (played by Sian Thomas) and delivered to Eleanor with such an enormous amount of gleeful schadenfreude, that you want to climb onto the stage and ram it down her throat.

The play is not without its high drama; Nell takes drastic measures to be rid of her jilted wife role, whilst a panicked Jim attempts to help. In the meantime, James and Eleanor become the alter-egos, spilling their true feelings about this event as it unfolds.

Bond, Cotton and Wanamaker play their parts with searing honesty and perfect comedic timing; Teale seemed to be somewhat lacklustre in his performance, although that could be due to the mild character he is playing. After some stilted dialogue and first-night nerves in her first scene, Scholey warms up to her role as a pleasure-seeking succubus quickly, and by the end, makes Kate an almost sympathetic character.

NV

View our show pages for more information about Passion Play, Duke of Yorks Theatre.