Black comedy is clearly Tony McNamara's forte. A few weeks back in Sydney I caught his wonderfully bilious attack on Australian sporting icons, The Recruit. Now the Pleasance has had the wit to import the Nuffield Theatre Southampton revival of an earlier McNamara play, in which he goes for the Australian business ethos with vitriolic glee.
The "principle" of the title is apparently to shoot first and ask questions later. This is anathema to the play's hero, Robbie, a drop-out house-husband who leaves the hard decisions to his clothes-designer wife. But when his tycoon father indulges in a botched suicide, Robbie learns that he will inherit half the family's global investment business if he can run it for a year. You half expect an Oz Mr Smith Goes to Washington in which the naive hero cleans up the Augean stables; what you find is that Robbie adapts, with suspicious enthusiasm, to the cut-throat world of Sydney's business politics.
Capitalism is obviously the target. But, like Hare and Brenton in Pravda, McNamara is enthralled by the world he is attacking: when Robbie tells his doubting wife that in his earlier incarnation, "I was a good man by default," you see his point. McNamara also has the ability constantly to take one by surprise. He reserves his funniest satire for Robbie's linen-suited Harvard MBA sidekick who has no qualms about selling torture instruments to Third World countries but who suddenly asks, "Do you think if I went to prison I'd be someone's bitch?"
Rudely direct in its dialogue, the play is morally disturbing in its portrait of the insidious attractions of corporate life. It is also, as Patrick Sandford's production makes clear, ebulliently funny. There's a nice design by Ti Green, in which the dying tycoon hovers over the action like a suspended mummy, and lively performances from Alan Westaway as the transformed Robbie, from Nicholas Rowe and Lucinda Cowden as the sidekick and his monster wife, and from David Henry as a macho businessman with perpendicular tendencies. Into our suffocatingly Anglo-American theatre, the play comes as a welcome breath of faintly polluted air.
• Until May 21. Box office: 020-7609 1800.
