October

Tim is an airline pilot and Angie an interior designer. They are one of those dreadful couples who keep reassuring themselves they are successful, affluent and, what’s more, good and decent people. Then they let a man into their apartment. He claims to be a former lover of the pregnant Angie.

Their cool lives quickly unravel. The man appears to haunt and terrorise them, eventually provoking them into an act which would normally repulse them. Ian Wilding wrote October in the month following the September 11 attacks, in the month after good and decent nations were similarly provoked beyond their moralities.

It’s a neat parallel. The couple become obsessively protective, even self-destructive, as they worry about this relatively powerless young man. They even hire a mad detective called Dick, a poseur with little grasp of reality but still capable of drawing blood.

Simon Burke plays Dick as so unhinged and illogical that it is impossible our good and decent couple would have hired him. Wilding I think is suggesting that Dick is instead a product of the couple’s own neurotic fear and mad imaginings. When Dick sniffs around Angie’s silken underwear, it is as though her husband is projecting his own corroding suspicions. But whoever Dick is, Burke’s buffoonery is so irrelevant and silly that I found this entertainer here unusually tiresome. The role of his character in the play and the emotional lives of the couple are just too unresolved.

The couple meanwhile talk at each other in crisp, often repetitive sentences, which suggests an intimacy long since frozen over into ritual. But with such brittle characters, we are allowed little insight into the vacuum of their lives and they hold little interest or empathy for us.

Christopher Stollery and Simone McAullay do, however, give flawless performances as the perfect couple staggered at the injustice of a world where suddenly they aren’t getting their own way. And Ed Wightman is also very fine as the nagging but ultimately innocuous young man.

We are left finally with a play, or rather an elongated sketch, which presents some smart conceits but begs a fully political and personal exploration of its themes.

Julian Meyrick directs it with a sure pace but without answering this vacuum. Similar territory has been fleshed out more successfully by the prolific political playwright Stephen Sewell.

October is running at the Stables Theatre until 26 May.