Monogamy/Malvern Theatres

PLAYWRIGHT Torben Betts has certainly sharpened his quill with this merciless satire on the telly chefs industry.

With dialogue that has even more cutting edge than one of Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen knives, we are lifted out of the television fantasy machine and dropped headlong into a thick stew of relationship breakdown that’s about to boil over at any moment.

Caroline (Janie Dee) is the cook with the butter-wouldn’t-melt screen persona but behind the fake image lies the grim reality that her life is thinner than the crust of one of her shepherd’s pies.

She’s stuck in an empty marriage to the stupendously glorious golf-player drunk Mike (Patrick Ryecart) which is why she’s moved from starter to mains courtesy of hunky-but-dim builder Graeme, played with relentless bewilderment by Jack Sandle.

Betts is a fearless writer by today’s tepid standards and confronts the new thought police hypocrisy head-on.

The odd couple’s son Leo (Jack Archer) is everything you would expect from a snowflaker with the usual bloated sense of entitlement.

He is a feckless, spoiled brat man-child who never, ever stops shouting, about to enrol at Cambridge University where he will presumably study for an honours degree in political correctness.

Of course, none of this shouty-group-think stops him parasiting his parents, his beliefs somehow not getting in the way of accepting huge handouts from the bank of mum and dad.

But it is Patrick Ryecart who steals the show. As his stage wife starts to flag a little under the weight of enough booze to float an aircraft carrier, he gradually builds into a colossus of character acting, fuelled by endless drinking and a booming attitude that makes Alf Garnett look like Oscar Wilde.

Meanwhile, Amanda (Genevieve Gaunt) and wronged wife Sally (Charlie Brooks) stir the burnt morsels of a marriage dying from denial and betrayal.

Torben Betts is without doubt the new kid on the writing block, his cleverly constructed dramas holding the audience right up and until the final curtain.

Monogamy runs until Saturday (May 5).

John Phillpott