Nights in wet satire

The final offering in this ill-chosen season to launch Hampstead's fine new theatre left me squirming with embarrassment. Tamsin Oglesby's US and Them, a laboriously overlong and pointless meeting of dull minds, is billed as a comedy of Anglo-American manners in which the old world and the new battle to understand each other.

No such conflict occurs until a penultimate scene of unbelievably juvenile, mudslinging and name-calling in which men turn violent and insults are traded instead of argument.

Miss Oglesby sets up a friendship between a middle-aged American and a British couple who meet in a Manhattan restaurant. But although there are regular flickers of comic potential and amusement, Oglesby never really defines her characters in political, social or cultural terms. Americans Ed and Lori seem rich, while the English, Martin and Charlotte, are not. But are the British innocent liberals and the Yanks rich, vacuous Republicans, or what? Miss

Oglesby leaves us to deduce. The quartet relate to each other in 19 protracted scenes of bland television sit-com entertainment. Class, money and religion raise no hackles. It beggars belief that their friendship collapses because Charlotte conceals the fact she was adopted. And with ponderous Anglo-Saxon irony the couples' young offspring, Jemima Rooper's nasal Izzie and Jonah Y Lotan's withdrawn Jay, fall in love, although always disagreeing.

Jennie Darnell's antiseptic production is played on Matthew Wright's neontinged stage design of opulent, post-modern minimalism, with a back panel on which small photographic images fail to set a mood. The effect is to render anything from English stately home to Manhattan apartment interchangeable.

The strands of plot are thin and unexciting: Hugh Bonneville's nicely irritated Martin, who has a touch of Richard Briers about him, though not a big enough one, is trying to market a remote-controlled, sheep-shaped lawn mower. And Matthew Marsh's swaggering, omniscient Ed thinks he can set up a deal. A wasted Harriet Walter twitters, coos and charms as Lori, while Siobhan Redmond oozes drops of late-flowering sex appeal. A night of wet satire.

Until 28 June. Box office: 020 7722 9301.

Us And Them