‘The Priory’ is an entertaining comedy about a group of thirty-somethings who get to together at a remote country house to celebrate the New Year. The evening has been organised by Kate (Jessica Hynes) in the hope that it will give her old university mates a chance to re-connect with each other. A failed writer struggling to cope with the death of her mother and the break-up of her long-term relationship, Kate uses this chummy premise as a ruse to spend time with Carl (Rupert Penry-Jones) an ex-boyfriend from university days with whom she has started having an affair. Unfortunately, Carl is married to bossy, self-obsessed and successful TV producer Rebecca (played with much panache by Rachael Stirling). Rebecca is meant to be staying in London with their kids, but much to Kate’s chagrin she turns up along with one or two other unexpected and uninvited guests and the evening rapidly unravels in a dark farce of accusation, upheaval and recrimination.
      Michael Wynne’s script plays fast and quick through a familiar roll call of mid thirties angst as we see all the characters struggling, in one way or another, to reconcile their diminishing expectations to bitter reality. All the clichés are there, but handled with enough verve and sparkle to make the audience cringe with amused recognition. Kate is the neurotic, needy singleton, a Bridget Jones type grappling pitifully with her fear of turning into a childless spinster. She leans heavily on her ‘gay best friend’ Daniel, a fastidious neurotic also grappling with the emotional void of singledom and disillusionment with the gay scene. They are joined by Ben (Alastair MacKenzie) a gadget obsessed travel writer and his attractive, much younger and wholly unsuitable fiancée Laura - a tactless Harvey Nichols beautician - played for full comic effect by Charlotte Riley. Laura’s naivety and enthusiasm for New Years presents plenty of painfully funny moments, whether she is telling Daniel how much she “loves the gays” or getting Kate to review the highs and lows of the previous year. The fact, however, that Laura and Ben are supposed only to have met the day before – and are now already engaged – opens a wholly comic, even farcical dimension to the play that undermines its more serious minded points about the existential crises that assail the characters. The dysfunctional picture is complete with the arrival of Rebecca and Carl, the ‘dissatisfied marrieds’ yearning for a way out yet lacking the courage to terminate a marriage where resentment has long since displaced love. Fuelled by an ever more desperate haze of alcohol and cocaine, relationships rapidly unravel in an escalation of ever-more embarrassing rows.
      Much of the promise of the first half of the play is lost in the second. Wynne seems uncertain which direction to take his drama and in the end events labour under the weight of too many influences. The script wavers uncertainly between farce, tragic-comedy, social satire and Country-House drama. We even have a brief Gothic moment with a ghostly monk who may or may not be haunting the house. The arrival of an Internet date for Daniel in the form of a rough local boy out for casual sex followed by Laura’s bloody self-harming episode at the end seems contrived and excessive, an attempt to ramp the material to a level that cannot really be sustained. Finally, Kate’s moralising at the end as she finds herself once more alone with Daniel seems forced, her attempt to rationalise her lot unconvincing and confused.
      Quibbles aside, ‘The Priory’ is an entertaining, well acted performance that offers a very funny and frequently cringe-worthy excavation of middle-class manners.
James Miller