Having children no more makes you a parent than owning a piano makes you a pianist, and Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play probes conventional ideas about parental responsibility in a manner that’s both raw and very funny.

The action centres around a birthday party thrown for Kristin, an art historian in her sixties. She’s joined by an old friend, her two sons and their contrasting partners.

A self-proclaimed radical who keeps a picture of Karl Marx above the loo, Kristin is impatient when listening to individuals but is fiercely interested in the grand narratives of politics and history. Florentine painting, humanism and Leftist dissent are her bulwarks against the twin onslaughts of religion and consumerism.

But have Kristin’s activism and intellectual pursuits made her a bad mother? Tellingly, her recently published memoir mentions neither of her sons. One remembers above all her absence and tells a poignant story about being forced to wait for her in a deserted train station in an unfamiliar city. The other simply wonders why she bothered having children. So, more cautiously, do we.

Although there are strong performances throughout Josie Rourke’s nicely textured production, the key figure is Kristin, and Paola Dionisotti is perfect as this hybrid of simpering scholarly harridan and repressed materfamilias.

At first the format of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s play seems cosily familiar but he skews the formulae of domestic black comedy to say some smart things about the mechanisms of emotional self-defence. The perceptive writing, which flirts with cliché then wittily evades it, confirms his standing as a fresh and sensitive voice.
Until 18 July (020 8743 5050).