Not had enough adultery on your theatregoing trips recently? Feel deprived of plays about male menopauses and desperate 40-year-old chaps on new-build, suburban estates close to London, whose marriages have drifted into the sexual doldrums? You know the types — those beta minus males, hoping that if they brush up their erotic techniques and try weight-training to pump up slack, under-used body parts, their wives will succumb to born-again, bedroom bliss. Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song duly delves into the vexed problem of marriages heading for the rocks.

Butterworth comes up with a collection of freshly dusted-down clichés and heavy-handed variations on the unoriginal marital theme, dependent on the style and manners of Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter. Welcome to a hybrid dramatist — Hal Pintbourn. An initial, noisy video of collapsing blocks is not intended as an amusing symbol of unfortunate male detumescence. Instead it introduces us to a lower middle class estate, whose identical houses are represented by segments of Jeremy Herbert’s revolving set in Ian Rickson’s neatly organised production.

Toby Jones’s demolition expert, a crashing bore called Ned, is hard at it, explaining to his handsome, buff neighbour, Andrew Lincoln’s Dale, who serves as narrator, the difference between a Designated Drop and Predicted Debris Area.

Butterworth overlooks the fact that a conventional bore like Ned, who is later allowed an interminable story of how he bought a birdbath in Gloucester and found true love, inevitably induces boredom himself.

Jones, a natural-born clown, a little of whom sometimes goes too grotesquely far when playing straight parts, represents Ned as an increasingly disturbed man, whose personal possessions, from silver-backed hairbrushes to old golf-clubs, are mysteriously vanishing — symbolic disappearances rather than real ones.

Once Ned begins a fitness, weight-lifting, hair-regaining programme, under Dale’s helpful supervision, Jones offers his popular anthology of groans, grunts and facial contortions as he vainly tries to make a new man of himself.

Sections of the first-night audience, responding with huge laughter to such ordinary ripostes as, “Well, that’s that” or, “I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on” clearly saw in Ned a comic-pathetic, male menopauser, easily cuckolded: in one scene Jones listens to a helpful guide to cunnilingus and adds in his own extraneous hand gestures. When his wife appears, his gestures morph into an imitation of Eric Clapton on guitar: Butterworth’s characteristic blend of low-grade comedy and mild farce may be manna from heaven to some, but it leaves me cold.

But Amanda Drew as Ned’s wife Joy, a cross between the lubriciously cool heroine of Pinter’s The Homecoming and the transforming femme fatale of The Lover, first exudes a fine, bored hauteur in Ned’s hopeful presence and smouldering ardour for Dale.

That the adulterous lovers never run away and that the dream-struck Dale rediscovers his possessions comes as no surprise. Butterworth’s hints of violence, misery and longing remain, like the play itself, superficial and
skin-deep.
Information 020 7359 4404. Closes 9 May. www.almeida.co.uk