Independent reviews the Pain and The Itch

When he took over the Royal Court in January, Dominic Cooke announced the theatre was going to make a break with some of its traditions. In his regime, it would be out with the kitchen sink and in with the dishwasher, so to speak.

Goodbye to the underclass as subject matter and hello to the bourgeois intelligentsia who form a large part of the Court's regular audience. Instead of plays that let us gawp like cultural tourists at the poor and the marginalised, there would be work that forced us to take an uncomfortable look at ourselves.

He certainly honours that in his brilliant inaugural production of an American play, The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris. This is a savage satire of the hypocrisy of affluent liberals. At its centre, there is a family Thanksgiving dinner whose hosts are Clay, an insecure, aggrieved house-husband (the superbly funny Matthew Macfadyen) and his spouse Kelly (Sara Stewart), a high-powered, bitter corporate exec.

It's a moot point whom this couple loathe more: George Bush or one another. They are the kind of people who go into contortions of righteous social concern not because they genuinely care but because they want to feel good about their supposed beliefs.

Their guests are Clay's mother (Amanda Boxer), a rambling biddy with short-term memory loss who thinks that because she watches PBS travel documentaries her sympathies are multicultural, and his cynical plastic surgeon brother (Peter Sullivan) who has brought along his girlfriend, Kalina (Andrea Riseborough). This young East European refugee was raped as a child; she can't get enough of American materialism; she is politically incorrect, to an outrageous extent, about gypsies, blacks and Jews; and she wants to put sexy supermodel make-up on the little over-protected daughter of Clay and Kelly. And as if she weren't bad enough, some alien creature seems to have been taking bites out of the avocadoes and the child has developed an ominous genital infection.

All of this is conveyed in flashbacks to Mr Hadid (Abdi Gouhad), a Muslim immigrant whose tragic connection with the family is gradually disclosed. I thought at first the play was going to be no more than a superior, politically angled sitcom but, through clever, intricate plotting, it builds into a devastating indictment of lip-service liberalism.

If only Clay and Kelly had ventured forth from the insulation of their rhetoric, they might have noticed things about their maids and their offspring that would have averted this shameful outcome. I don't see how Cooke could have directed this play any better. Highly recommended.