The Guardian - 28/11/02 - Michael Billington

Back in the 1970s Michael Weller was a hippie Boswell charting American alternative culture in plays such as Cancer and Fishing. Now he is back with this two-hander about middle-aged emotional angst, but has lost none of his gift for uncomfortable home truths.

Weller presents a familiar situation: two ex-lovers meet up after an 11-year gap for a nerve-jangling reunion. Lindy, who abandoned the affair for the sake of her marriage to a dull midwest businessman, plays the anxious hostess over a hotel room dinner. Adam, her equally fretful guest, is now a thriving, married New York architect supposedly on a professional trip to the midwest. As the two fence awkwardly over dinner, the question is not whether they will hop into bed: that much you can almost guarantee. It is whether they can rekindle the old spark and make a bonfire of their existing, unfulfilled lives.

Obviously we have been here before: this is Private Lives for the ravaged American middle classes. There are also times when you get impatient with the couple's endless self-obsession. But Weller's great virtue is his unflinching honesty and ability to show how two people who have a desperate need for each other can still entertain different dreams. Adam craves an emotional intimacy he cannot find in a functional marriage he is loath to destroy: Lindy, who turns out to be a pill-popping manic depressive, is the one who really wants to burn her boats. Out of this intractable dilemma Weller weaves a play both painfully honest and unexpectedly funny.

It would not work half as well if it were not superbly played. Gillian Anderson happily swaps Agent Scully for a role that requires her to do an emotional striptease; and what she does, with uncommon skill, is peel off Lindy's protective layers. Starting off as a charcoal-suited hostess, she gradually reveals a woman living on the edge and yearning for someone who can cope with her instability. What Anderson excellently conveys is the sharp wit that often accompanies flakiness. When her lover tells her he wants a woman he can be close to, she snaps back: "Am I a finalist, or was this the first cut?"

She is strongly partnered by Roger Allam, who catches precisely Adam's mixture of cool calculation and desperate love: even if the character wants, so to speak, to have it both ways, Allam implies he still has an obdurate decency.

John Caird directs with a needle-sharp awareness of the couple's mixture of attack and evasion. Tim Hatley's set has all the bleak luxury of a midwest hotel room. The real surprise is to find on a West End stage a play that tells the truth not just about sex but about the miasmic uncertainties of infidelity.

Evening Standard - 28/11/02 - Nicholas de Jongh

Gillian's mystery affair is missing a vital X factor

GILLIAN ANDERSON'S Agent Scully of X-Files fame was a cool, surgically honest character. And Anderson applied a little refreshing, but brutal, honesty to her debut in front of London's fearsome theatre critics, writes Luke Leitch.

"How was it?" she pondered. "Bloody hell - the first couple of scenes just sucked, they really sucked." Her stark assessment was in contrast to the audience, many of whom rose to applaud it. Anderson conceded that it improved. "It wasn't that fun for the first few scenes but then we started to have fun - and the second act felt really good. But it was so, so odd. When I get nervous I get a bit stiff."

AN evening of sexual incitement, though never of excitement, is offered in this wilting little bedroom drama from America. What The Night Is For busies itself brooding about middle-aged infidelity and the urge to break marriage bonds for the sake of a long-lost affair, which materialises in the provoking shape of Miss Gillian Anderson. You might think any affair in which Miss Anderson has a welcoming hand would rush to a hard and fast conclusion. But there's nothing speedy, dramatic or clear-cut about Michael Weller's superficial, two-character comedy of adulterous manners.

The action happens one night when Melinda (Lindy) Meltz and architect Adam Penzius, old lovers and now unhappily married, are reunited after years apart. They enjoy a flirtatious champagne supper in her hotel room and end up trying to have each other: there's more than one slip between bed and bliss. The comedy's final message - that it's better to settle for extra­marital happiness than to be dutiful, repenting at leisure that you've been left with an unwanted partner - is all very well, or not. But the theory needs to be passionately debated and tested, not just imposed at the play's conclusion.

At least the voluptuous Miss Anderson, from The X-Files, who made such a heartfelt, cinematic impression in The House of Mirth, puts on a cool, confident and natural show. But although almost bursting from a tight black costume and wearing heels so high you'd think they'd cause dizziness, this star's sex­appeal had all to do with physical presence and nothing with emotional firepower. What's more, her stage presence is not very strong. When it comes to sexual chemistry between Anderson's Lindy and Roger Allam's Adam we have to settle for mere carpentry. The couple are not so much smitten as smooth. And Mr Allam, whom Lindy makes sound like a mature hunk, lolls and slouches around like a rag-doll with the stuffing already knocked out of him. Instead of burning with ardour he modestly smoulders.

In a mid-western city hotel room, which Tim Hatley designs as some dark-blue, windowless vault with only a big red bed and dining table to take the eye, Melinda and Adam at first seem mysterious. Their talk is boring in its cute winsomeness as they discover about each other's wives and kids. Why, though, did their love-affair fizzle out, if it was such a meeting of minds and bodies? Why won't Adam leave his wife although he dislikes her? Weller never really lets us know. Instead What The Night Is For becomes a will-they; won't-they begin-again affair as the couple change their seduction ploys: Adam fears change, hopes for an affair, while Lindy longs for lasting commitment.

Allam has a nice line in sardonic humour. But there's little drama at stake. The play would only grab our hearts and minds if its highly accomplished director John Caird had goaded his actors into playing as if overwhelmed by the returning force of old passion. Unfortunately, a composed Miss Anderson maintains her amusing, elegant front and far from being driven wild or devastated by desire behaves as if she always kept a firm hand on her own brakes. And Roger Allam remains quite unruffled by the force of his longings. What this medium-cool night was for I cannot really say.

Times - 28/11/02 - Benedict Nightingale

A sex romp to file under old hat

IN EACH of the four scenes that constitute Michael Weller's adultery play, the stage management moves the double bed that is the evening's main prop.

That way, you don't just see the hotel room where John Caird's production occurs from new angles. You are also supposed to see further into the psychological crevices of the two ex-lovers played by Gillian Anderson, late of The X-Files, and Roger Allam, late of the RSC and National.

I wish I could say that my interest intensified as the play's geometry shifted, but, no, it didn't. Anyone who knows Cancer, which the American dramatist premiered here 30 years ago, can attest that Weller has written touchingly and intelligently for the stage, and those who have seen the movie Ragtime will agree that he can turn in a fine screenplay, too.

But when the Comedy programme declares that infidelity has provided him with "wonderful subject matter" because it is an "incredibly emotionally charged taboo", well, my reply is that a) the subject is as old hat as theatrical hats get, and b) the charge delivered by Weller and his two performers will not exactly light up the West End. Anderson is Lindy, a one-time poet who has disappeared into a mid-Western marriage with a failed tycoon she describes as "a great big zero with pedigree".

Allam is Adam, a successful New York architect whom she loved and left years ago. And here they are again, warily meeting in the room she has hired while she attends some literary conference and he prepares to do a bit of building. How, why and which of them is responsible for arranging this belated reunion is much, too much discussed; but what mainly matters is, of course, whether sex, love and A Relationship are in the offing. I don't think I'm betraying secrets if I reveal that some mildly racy moments ensue. For instance, the opening orgasms (yes, they happen) go counter to gender expectation, leaving poor Allam awkwardly and comically dealing with the after-effects of coitus interruptus. But as the evening went on I was increasingly reminded of the sort of antique romance in which couples ended up saying, "No, no, Reginald, it cannot be".

True, the writing is wittier and sharper than that, and the message is more, "Wow, Reg, let's go for it"; but the emotions on show did not grip, move or engage me much more strongly.

Do the anguishings about past, present and future, about husbands, wives, children, drugs, madness and the whole damn thing, become too enervating? Maybe. Or is there simply a lack of electricity between Anderson and Allam? That, too, perhaps. As it is, Allam provides most of the energy and variety while, much of the time, Anderson's slow, slightly swaggering delivery put me in mind of a Mae West on tranquillisers.

True, she has a self-revelatory outburst near the end. True, she has the odd nice line to put across: "Adultery's one thing, but I draw the line at exercise" is her cool riposte to his fondness for dawn jogging. But passion? Agony? The corrosive nostalgia for lost love that Weller wants her to convey? No, she can't cope with them.

Metro - 28/11/02 - Claire Allfree

Opening the ex-files

Gillian Anderson and Roger Allam are slouched together on a bed in Anderson's dimly lit dressing room at the Comedy Theatre. It's a suitably cosy setting for this curious marriage of talents: one a famous TV and film star, the other an excellent but unfamous stage actor. Both open tonight in Michael Weller's two-hander about a man and a woman on the verge of rekindling an affair. 'It's just as well we get on,' says Allam, 'It's a rather intimate play.'

Allam's role in What The Night Is For has been somewhat overlooked in the flood of interviews the play has prompted, all of them eager to harness some of Anderson's undoubtedly starrier appeal. But Allam - who was nominated for two Olivier awards in 2000 for Money and Summerfolk and yet could sit by you on the bus without you noticing him - seems grateful to be standing, at this stage of the game at least, in his co-star's shadow. 'Do I mind that Gillian is getting all the attention? Are you kidding?'

Anderson, for her part, is sanguine ­ after all, being pestered by press and public is something the former X-Files star has dealt with for years. Not that she isn't keen to put as much distance between that show and this one: eager to talk at length about What The Night Is For, considerably less eager to discuss anything else. 'I'm extremely boring. I live a very quiet life. Yet people keep asking me about my childhood and expect me to wander around with entourages. I rarely recognise myself when I read about myself in the papers.'

That the play taps into a very modem phenomenon, then, happily makes it particularly interesting to discuss. The plot is straight out of friendsreunited.com: two college sweethearts, both married to other people, back in touch after 11 years thanks to a casual e-mail, and now teetering on the edge of possibility. It's a play about chance and choice, about the opportunity to change your life forever and, most of all, about finding the courage to do so.

Both Allam and Anderson agree that the play will touch a nerve in nearly everyone who sees it - after all, who hasn't dreamed of getting back in touch with their first love? But it's an issue also mired in problems of a very modern kind. 'In the past, couples were much keener to work through their difficulties, go into couple counseling or whatever,' says Anderson. 'These days, people are quick to say '"this is unacceptable" when confronted by a problem in their relationship, and are quick to assume there is something more acceptable around the corner.'

For Allam, the play reflects the extent to which 21st-century relationships carry the burden of unrealistic expectation. 'Blokes expect to shack up with a woman who is not only supposed to be a wonderful wife, mother and housekeeper, but a whore in bed while also being your best friend. We all expect absolutely everything these days, and it's very difficult.'

For both, the challenge of appearing in a play that is directly emotional and immediately relevant is clearly a strong one. After all, Anderson spent almost a decade applying scientific theory to the existence of aliens while Allam's CV is littered with what he calls obvious character roles. 'Last year, I was a drag queen, the year before I played Hitler,' he says. 'In this play, there's no beard or period costume to hide behind.'

There's a chance that, thanks to the attention it has attracted through Anderson, the play may prove something of a career breakthrough for Allam. For years he has been dubbed what in the profession is known as 'an actor's actor', meaning, basically, that he doesn't work much on TV. 'Of course I would like to be more famous. It offers more career possibilities. But then it can prove restrictive. Plus you get hassled when you go shopping.' As for Anderson, she, ironically, is simply happy to be on stage. 'I'm doing something I love and I'm more creatively fulfilled than I've been in a long time' she says. 'If I die tomorrow, I'll die happy.'

Daily Telegraph - 29/11/02 -Charles Spencer

Put this show out of its misery

THERE are moments during this dire new play that plumb such excruciating depths of embarrassment that I felt like screaming: "I'm a reviewer, get me out of here." That lamentable musical Romeo and Juliet seems a breeze in comparison, Madonna's performance in Up for Grabs an experience of rare pleasure. This one is a pure, unmitigated stinker.

It is hard to decide what causes most pain. Is it Gillian Anderson's pitifully exposed and inadequate performance? Is it the cliché-ridden desperation of Michael Weller's ghastly script? Is it the sight of that excellent actor Roger Allam, and that distinguished director John Caird, demeaning themselves with such tosh? Or is it the thought of the show's producers, throwing any idea of quality control to the winds as they set up the latest piece of cynical celebrity casting?

They should be ashamed of themselves. They will doubtless argue that casting Anderson, fondly remembered as Scully in the The X -Files, will attract new, youthful audiences into the West End, Yeah, maybe. But underpowered, second-rate rubbish like this will merely ensure that they never come back.

This is an adultery play that could put you off sex for life. Weller, an American, admits that he got the idea for it after watching David Hare's infinitely superior Skylight, which also concerns the reunion of two former lovers. But whereas Hare's play smouldered with passion and blazed with ideas, Weller's seems like the kind of drivel you might encounter in a women's magazine.

The action is set in a hotel room in an unnamed city in the American Midwest. Adam Penzius (Allam), a successful New York architect, has tracked down his old squeeze, Melinda Metz, via the internet. Eleven years earlier they met at a book club, and would repair to Adam's office for sensational sex after discussing Crime and Punishment. But then Melinda skipped out of town with her husband and two kids without even saying goodbye. Adam now wants to resume the affair. Melinda appears to be consenting to a one-night stand to provide what Americans tiresomely describe as "closure".

When you remember such great adultery plays as Coward's Private Lives, Pinter's Betrayal and Stoppard's The Real Thing, the sheer plodding ineptitude of Weller's writing is grotesquely apparent. He doesn't seem to have anything remotely fresh or interesting to say on the subject, his characterisation is threadbare, his dialogue abysmal. "I had to schedule suffering between dishes and laundry," says Melinda, looking back on the end of the affair. "God save anyone from going through what I had to getting over you." And God save anyone from stale, lifeless drama like this.

In the second half, it becomes clear that Weller realises he's written a bummer and is starting to panic. It is suddenly clumsily revealed that Melinda is mentally ill, and the character turns into a very poor man's version of Blanche DuBois.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh as Anderson turns all bipolar on us, waving her arms in the air and laughing hysterically. Frankly, I felt like doing the same myself. Before that, her weirdly bland and detached performance struggled to raise itself to a level of basic competence.

And voyeurs fondly looking forward to an eyeful of celebrity flesh are in for a grievous disappointment.

Allam delivers his lines and manages to avoid bumping into the furniture, but quite evidently feels that the play does not merit any more than that.

There isn't the faintest hint of a sexual spark between the two players, and the sooner the show closes and puts everyone out of their misery, the better.

Daily Mail - 29/11/02 - Patrick Marmion

Sorry, Scully, but you've lost your X-Appeal

UNLIKE David Duchovny in the long-running cult TV series, Gillian Anderson's X-Files character was the one who was hard to convince about paranormal forces.

Now, in Michael Weller's play about an adulterous tryst, Roger Allam has just as much difficulty convincing Anderson's character about his very normal lustful forces. As a result, this is a play about two people beating around the bush and never getting to demonstrate what the night is really for.

The big question posed is: Should Anderson's character, Lindy, get together with Adam, an architect played by Allam?

They had a fling years ago in New York. She was a poet, he was a doting admirer.

But far from cueing grand passion, the first half of the play (set in a hotel room in the American Midwest) finds the pair circling one another warily, talking as though negotiating an employment contract.

Finally, in the second half, she becomes a little warmer and he more brittle - until her big dark secret gets out of the bag.

Making her West End debut, Anderson is a stubbornly coy mistress who starts out trussed-up in an office suit ­ albeit with a slinky blouse. She is studiously self-controlled, preferring iced water to strong drink as the emotional temperature rises.

Even after she lets herself go, she conjures up a pair of newly pressed silk pyjamas to secure her maidenly modesty. There is little sense of the ravishing, mysterious poet Allam proclaims her to be.

As her middle-aged paramour, Roger Allam has a big bearish presence and a lush, lived-in voice. He starts out casually flippant, even vulgar, asking: 'How's your meat?' as they chomp their way through dinner.

Gradually, his sincerity grows and his tenacity remains unflagging in the face of stiff feminine resistance. It would make any nun proud - and any Don Juan retire home for his Horlicks.

The whole scenario is too chaste and there's little sexual tension between Anderson and Allam. You're never bothered whether they get together or not.

Directed by John Caird, it's an intimate play that really belongs in a studio theatre. It would be best enjoyed up close and personal in a venue that didn't encourage you to consider its wider significance.

It lacks a theme to take it beyond the random problems of two married people in mid-life crisis, pussy-footing around and agonising over whether or not to commit adultery.

Weller's dialogue is slick, sensitive and often funny - but funny-droll, never funny-hilarious.

Tim Hatley's design is plain and soulless, like business hotels everywhere, but this accuracy contributes little to a drama that also lacks distinguishing character.

His full square set revolves placidly around, presenting the dining table, the easy chair, the double bed and eventually the suitcase rack. It's supposed to be a different psychological angle at every turn, but like Caird's ponderous direction, it struggles to lift the evening out of the ordinary.

Whatever the night is for, Weller's play remains 'out there' until February next year.

The Sunday Times - 01/12/02 - John Peter

Her darkest hour
Gillian Anderson endures the tedium of Michael Weller's play.

There is a young man in uniform standing in the entrance of the Comedy Theatre. He stops you as you go in. The poor fellow's job, which he dispatches with great courtesy, is to ask whether you have a camera in your bag or on your person and beg you to leave it in the cloak­room - or at least promise not to use it. The reason is that Michael Weller's play, What the Night Is For, stars Gillian Anderson, of
The X Files fame, and some people have been taking photographs during preview performances.

So this is the way we live now, eh? Here come the new barbarians. Snap the action. Show it to
your friends. Don't bother about the actors, they get paid anyway. Don't bother about the rest of the audience, either: none of their business, it's a free country, you've paid for your tickets. Like those
massive, cold-eyed heavies in black suits who patrolled the Wyndhams when Madonna was appearing there, these camera savages are part of the price the rest of us are paying for the ghastly celebrity obsession that is contaminating the London theatre.

What makes all this even worse is when the celebrity in question happens to be an actress who has
not been unsexed and mangled into a faceless robostar in the lower regions of television and showbiz, but a serious theatre artist who works hard and knows her craft. The camera savages have no idea of the concentration and nervous tension that go with being on stage with one other actor (this is a two-hander) for the entire length of a two-and-a-half-hour play: as far as they are concerned, Anderson is a celebrity whom they can treat as their property.

At this point, reviewing the play can no longer be postponed. I have tried, for the last three paragraphs, but duty calls. So, here goes. Sitting through What the Night Is For is to experience a spine-crunching tedium. Some plays should carry warnings such as: Beware! High cliche count! Danger to mental health! This is such a play. It could have been written by a youngster in a suburban scriptwriting class who had soaked his brains in the plays of Edward Albee and in innumerable episodes of Friends, but without learning anything from the poisonously humane eloquence of the one and the deft, deadpan humour of the other. The result is thin, smug and dreary. The writing is smoothly and seamlessly flaccid. Yes, you are on a journey here, and it feels endless.

The scene is a fairly swanky hotel room, somewhere in the American Midwest, where Melinda Metz is attending an educational conference. She is married, with two children, to Hugh, a bicycle millionaire who plans to run for the state senate. Adam Penzius (Roger Allam) is a New York architect who, 11 years earlier, had a long, passionate affair with her. Then she suddenly left, without a word. For years, he could not find her. Then he did. He came to these parts for a presentation and rang her. She invited him to supper.

The play hits the ground at a slow crawl. The dialogue features those evasive courtesies, courtly reproaches and swaggeringly self­deprecating jovialities that make bad American TV -film writing so
unique. The humour is goofy, prurient and bland. Gradually, sincerity comes to the surface, gasping for air. Was it really a coincidence that Adam came all the way here to see a client? And why did she ask him to dinner in her room rather than lunch somewhere else? The air is heavy with smart-aleck double entendres and amateur psychiatry. The only thing such characters like more than analysing other people is analysing themselves.

"How the hell did we get here so fast?" cries Adam, after what seems ages of fencing and confessionals. So fast? There are few things more tedious than being always several steps ahead of the characters and the author. Finally, the inevitable happens. But you are still only halfway through the play: complications occur, doubts arise and terrible truths are revealed. The writing clots and thickens. "Intimacy takes courage. You can't put furniture in the doorway." "A woman can forgive almost everything, Adam, except hesitation in desiring her." "Words are personal. Sex is just bodies."
"The heart always knows."

I had no idea that there were still people who wrote like this. How the two actors can handle such stuff borders on the miraculous. I am not being sarcastic. Allam deploys all his great ironic talent and sensitivity in shaping a character out of all this: a man who hesitates too long and does not quite have the courage of his lack of convictions. Anderson has a strong, elegant stage presence, poised and watchful. She flutters her fingers rather a lot, which does not suit what Melinda has in the way of character. Her voice needs more oomph and colour, but in Act II she has an outburst that shows the vocal and emotional range she is capable of. I would like to see her again, and soon, in a real play. Alas, What the Night Is For is not what the theatre is for.

The Sunday Telegraph - 01/12/02 - John Gross

Lacklustre affair

The long procession of American stars ready to take their chance on the London stage continues. The latest is Gillian Anderson of The X Files, who proves to be as easy on the eye in reality as she is on the screen. I don't think anyone who goes to Michael Weller's What the Night Is For at the Comedy Theatre just to gawp at her will be disappointed. But for the rest of us, that still leaves the play.

Anderson plays Lindy, who is unhappily married to a Midwest tycoon. Eleven years ago, back in New York, she met an architect called Adam (played by Roger Allam), who was equally dissatisfied with his marriage. They had an affair, but eventually she broke it off without warning; now they have re-established contact and contrived to be in the same Midwest city at the same time - she for a conference, he to meet a client.

When she asks him up to have dinner in her hotel suite, the bedroom beckons: that much is obvious. The real question is what lies beyond. Are they going to resume a full-scale relationship, and if so, on what terms? Adam, who has no intention of leaving his family, is looking for a reliable extra-marital haven. Lindy turns out to have a more permanent shift of allegiances in mind.

The first half of the evening is devoted to flirting, chaffing, reminiscing, catching up. The tone is humorous, though without being especially funny, and even when the couple finally get to bed, comedy prevails. (It's Lindy who climaxes first.) But then, as the difference between the couple's long­terms goals becomes clear, tension rises - and there is an escalation to all-out drama when it emerges that Lindy suffers from a mental disorder and needs medication to prevent her flying apart.

You rather wonder why Adam hasn't had an inkling of the fact before. The whole play would be stronger, I think, if Lindy had proved to be merely difficult or demanding rather than positively ill. As it is, she has a hard edge. She makes it clear that she is attracted to Adam because he is a success, and turned off by her husband, whose business affairs have come to grief, because he isn't. An interesting theme, but it is only glanced at.

The play as a whole veers between the serious and the stagey. You half believe in it, you are half aware all the time how artificial it is. Anderson is efficient but leaves you feeling uninvolved. Allam is incapable of giving a bad performance, but for once he looks slightly uncomfortable: he can't help making Adam a more sympathetic character than the part warrants. John Caird. directs; the designs - below his usual high level - are by Tim Hatley.

The Mail on Sunday - 01/12/02 - Georgina Brown

A recent article about some couples who had got in touch with mates from the old days through the Friends Reunited web site stated that an extraordinary number had ditched their partners and run off into the sunset with the once acnefied youth they'd snogged on a geography field trip and had never quite forgotten.

I'd guess this has something to do with our incurable romanticism, a desire for fantasy to trump reality, or maybe just a need to tie up loose ends. I'd also bet a lot of money that very few of us prove resistant to a blast from the past.

Whatever it is, the couple in What The Night Is For, a provocative, often painful, new play by American writer Mike Weller, have got it bad, which is why they have contrived a meeting 11 years after their affair ended. In the intervening years, both have married and had children.

Lindy, a special-needs teacher, is attending a conference in the Mid-West; Adam, a top New York architect, has a vague excuse involving a new project. There's absolutely no doubt that they will end up in the vast bed in Lindy's luxury hotel room. The real question here is whether their smouldering passion will spark into an extra­marital affair or explode into an inferno which will raze their current relationships and then blaze into a magnificent, permanent marriage of two minds.

Potentially scorching stuff. Gillian Anderson (Scully from The X-Files) sizzles deliciously as Lindy, hot to trot in a suit from which she is literally and metaphorically busting out all over, babbling and barely able to hang on to her fork let alone the thread of the conversation.

Roger Allam's stolid, pasty Adam, alas, has the reverse effect on me, which lowers the temperature in John Caird's production. Moreover, Weller's over-literal, insufficiently dramatic writing becomes wearing. He has that maddening American heavy-handedness, over­stating and underlining, lest we shouldn't understand.

The revelation that Lindy is a chemically dependent manic depressive (cue full-scale bonkers fit) in order to demonstrate that Adam deals with her emotional complexity better than her dull, grey, ever-forgiving husband almost finished me off.

But I forgave him because of his occasional startling insight into what women want, how far they'll go to get it and how, in the meantime, they 'schedule their suffering between dishes and laundry', all of which is blisteringly true. And because of the odd line ('Adultery's one thing, but I draw the line at exercise') which made me laugh out loud.

The Stage - 05/12/02 - John Thaxter

Set in a Midwest hotel bedroom, Michael Weller's romantic comedy brings together former lovers, long married to other partners, more than a decade after the end of their torrid New York affair. During those lost years both have thought longingly of each other, as if sharing a parallel relationship. Now what starts as an exploratory room service dinner for two soon rekindles their passion.

Looking for financial security, she had married a bicycle tycoon but now finds herself tied to a dud failure with a suspicious mind. While he, a successful New York architect in a cold domestic relationship, is desperate for emotional intimacy. But with growing family responsibilities and the devastation that divorce can bring, will their romance end as it ended before?

Tim Hatley's revolving room setting cleverly defines the four sustained scenes as we move from the dining table to their shared bed and then to possible departure. John Caird's pacy premiere production reveals the play as a superb vehicle for mature stage stars, none more attractive or more perfectly matched than British theatre luminary Roger Allam and American screen actress Gillian Anderson. Both are at the peak of their performing powers, he warmly masculine and resonant, she mercurial and larky, together generating a powerful sexual chemistry.

Anderson, best known here as Agent Scully of The X-Files, comes with a Broadway pedigree, striking stage presence, expressive hand gestures - if too often masking her features during their first, tentative scene - and an ability to deliver one-liners with a wry edge that defines both her kooky character and the moment.

Allam's assured performance is one of the most watchable things he has done since leaving the RSC and this delightful and engaging stage partnership should surely launch him as a bankable West End star.