Fintan O'Toole reviews Dinner With Friends at the Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin.

Dinner With Friends

Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin

Fintan O'Toole

It says a lot about the state of contemporary drama in the US that Donald Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Dinner With Friends, now given its Irish première by Gúna Nua. Margulies's play is typical of the mainstream of American playwrighting now: clean, polished, skilful, wryly restrained. It has the professionalism you would expect from someone who teaches playwrighting at Yale Drama School. With its cast of four and its concern with the lives of baby boomers in opulent houses, it is easy to stage and accessible to a well-off audience. It is slow to make any emotional impact and quick to evaporate from the memory. And it highlights the rather depressing fact that the most interesting and adventurous dramatists still writing in the US are Arthur Miller, who was born in 1915 and started writing 60 years ago, and Edward Albee, who was born in 1928 and wrote The Zoo Story in 1958.

Dinner With Friends owes its ultimate dullness to two related restrictions. It operates in a weightless environment where the laws of political and social gravity are suspended. Its two couples - the food writers Karen and Gabe and the lawyer Tom, who is splitting up from his artist wife, Beth - exist in a bubble. There is no sense of context, no hint at a wider world or even a wider America. History doesn't pump through their veins in the way it does in, for example, Chekhov's characters.

Partly for this reason, there is no real interest in the possibilities of theatre as a form. Watching Dinner With Friends, where most of the action consists of eating and drinking, I was reminded of Brendan Behan's quip that the Abbey in the 1950s was the best-fed theatre company in the world, because, in the kind of play it did, every time there was a crisis someone put on a pan of rashers. Replacing the rashers with pumpkin risotto hardly represents progress.

What you get without either a broader context or a sense of theatricality is solipsism. The play deals with the effect of the collapse of Tom and Beth's marriage on that of their best friends, Gabe and Karen. All the standard tropes that are dealt with far better in John Updike's novels make their appearance: intimations of mortality in middle age, pining for the freedom of lost youth, the competing pulls of sexual excitement and familiar intimacies. We move crisply from Karen and Gabe's beautiful dining room to Beth and Tom's beautiful bedroom. We flash back to the beautiful house in beautiful Martha's Vineyard where the first couple introduced the second to each other all those years ago. We watch Tom and Gabe drink San Pellegrino in a beautiful bar. This world is beautifully realised in Ferdia Murphy's sets, Sinéad McKenna's lighting and Leonie Prendergast's costumes, all of which reek of Martha Stewart before she was sent to jail.

And we endure the tedious self-regard of lines like "you never took me seriously as an artist", "I always felt inauthentic living this life" and "I asked what I'd been doing with my life and it seemed so insignificant to me". At least some members of the audience must have known what this felt like.

Plays like this usually owe their impact in the US to the availability of actors trained to invent a life behind the most lifeless characters. Most Irish actors, fed on meatier scripts, are less comfortable with this necessity. In David Parnell's crisp production, Fiona Bell manages superbly as Beth and Paul Meade's Tom is quietly impressive. But neither Peter Hanly as Gabe nor Karen Ardiff as Karen can work up enough enthusiasm to fuel even a convincing American accent, much less to inhabit the bodies of smooth, East Coast foodies. Trapped as they are in this airless, soundproof play, it is hard to blame them.