Yasmina Reza’s feted satire of two couples locked in passive aggressive combat inside a tasteful French living room smashed the facade of smugly civilised middle-class life when it premiered in 2008.
Fifteen years later, under Nicholai La Barrie’s deft direction, it plays out like a comedy of manners, damning in its portrait of bourgeois parenthood and marriage (“the most dreadful ordeal god can inflict,” says a character of the latter) albeit without the feral, growling quality of the original.
