Hollywood, remarked Marilyn Monroe, “is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”

Rates may have gone up, but this assessment applies perfectly to Douglas Carter Beane’s pointed satire on Tinseltown hypocrisy.

Previously a success on Broadway, The Little Dog Laughed puts values and indeed prices under the microscope.

It’s a comedy of manners, yet also a skewering of a venal industry in which hearts and souls are as expendable as old socks.

Rupert Friend plays Mitchell, an up-and-coming actor whose ascent is bedevilled by “a slight recurring case of homosexuality”.

Tamsin Greig is Diane, the ferociously ambitious agent who would love to push Mitchell back in the closet and get on with the business of making money.

Mitchell’s immediate problem, or in truth Diane’s, is Alex, a gawkily charming rent boy.

The burgeoning relationship between the two young men threatens to undermine Diane’s plans. But Alex’s girlfriend, the fame-hungry Ellen, may be able to provide an unlikely solution.

There are moments when Carter Beane’s writing is piercingly funny, recalling the fat-free wit of Noel Coward. Diane gets the best of it.

Yet there is a lack of resonance, warmth and depth. The play is smart, but clever-clever rather than intelligent.

The vitality of Jamie Lloyd’s production radiates from Greig. Her Diane is both heartless and perversely lovable.

She excels at elegant soundbites, throwing away the sort of aphorisms most of us would want to stuff and mount.

Rupert Friend nicely conveys the brittleness of Mitchell, whose sexual initiation as a boy Scout was “the merit badge that dare not speak its name”, and Gemma Arterton makes the best of a somewhat limited role.

But the most satisfying performance besides Greig’s comes from Harry Lloyd, winsome as the naďve Alex.

Soutra Gilmour’s design is not much more than a big white box, a deliberately unforgiving setting.

The play might work better in a smaller environment; although its style is declamatory, it would benefit from more intimacy.

Really, though, it is a vehicle for whoever plays Diane, and Tamsin Greig revels in the part’s opportunities for badinage and acerbic quickness.

Her diction and poise are razor-sharp. When she’s offstage, the audience longs to have her back.

Until 10 April. Information 0844 579 1974.