There is something rotten in the state of Hampstead. It comes most recently in the shape of April de Angelis new play, which takes us into the gated community apartment of Lara and Richard, an agoraphobic journalist and her politician husband turned writer. Enter their dinner party guests, Caitlin and Joe, she a nurse who specialises in breasts but who is also a budding writer, he a drugs counsellor with a nice turn in cynicism and laconic opposition to all and sundry. Any play featuring three middle-class writers, one of them a politician, and a drug counsellor ought to serve as a warning. But wait.Enter Shelley (Vicki Pepperdine), the uninvited guest of the piece, a mother from the nearby council estate - different class, geddit? - seemingly obsessed with her dead son Lee, blown up in Iraq for the want of a jacket. And whose fault was that? Well, Richard the politician of course. And didnt his journalist wife Lara brand him rat boy in her rag, and sow the seeds of his destruction by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? And didnt dinner party guest, breast-specialist nurse Caitlin, cause the boy psychological conflict by taking him to bed? If An Inspector Calls comes to mind, banish it immediately. This is vastly inferior stuff.The trouble with Amongst Friends is that from the very first moment you meet them, you never believe in any of the characters. They are so one-dimensional as to almost slide into oblivion through the grooves in the polished wooden flooring of the apartment. Helen Baxendale and Aden Gillett as Lara and Richard, and Emma Cunliffe and James Dreyfus as the guests, struggle with some of the worst dialogue I have heard on the stage in a long time. Baxendale, particularly, has a hard time of it, trying to make something of a journalist too terrified to leave her flat and face the outside world (would that there were more like her). When her husband gives his credit card details to their uninvited guest so her non-existent charitable organisation can extract five thousand pounds from his account, she makes no effort to stop him. And this, minutes after she has viciously tried to eject the scheming visitor. Then, incredibly, their unlikely and uninvited nemesis is allowed to sit down and stay for dinner. So much for secure, gated communities.My greatest sympathy is reserved for Vicki Pepperdine who, as Shelley, has to play one the most bizarre and unbelievable of the characters. It comes as no surprise - and frankly, it is of not much interest either - that her son never existed. In one excruciating scene, she puts up her hood and becomes his lost spirit. Oh, and theres a change in the lighting to accentuate the mood. When, shortly after the interval, one of the characters leaps off the balcony to a certain death, one wishes the rest of the cast would follow, along with everyone else connected to this abysmal production (excepting the set designer - it is excellent).Amongst Friends was simply not ready to put on the stage. How it got past the first day of rehearsal must remain a mystery. Perhaps motivation took a back seat, perhaps no-one spotted the dire dialogue. Though I cant believe it. The play was commissioned, perhaps for some writers a bad thing. In the programme notes, Hampstead Literary Manager Neil Grutchfield in interviewing April de Angelis asks her what she sees as the responsibility of a playwright. Her answer in part is to show this feeling I have about the world that I am experiencing.I would suggest that the next time Miss de Angelis writes a play, she uses her experiences to write about real people who have real feelings and real failings. To use cardboard characters to make a socio-political point is simply not good enough.
