The playwright David Eldridge has been labelled "promising" ever since Serving It Up at the Bush four years ago. With this new play at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, that promise is richly fulfilled. It's a kind of teachers' La Ronde, which deals, in wittily circular fashion, with romantic and sexual agony among the academic classes.
The play consists of three interlinked duologues. In the first Nick, a London comprehensive teacher, is cooking dinner for the adoring Helen; a crisis erupts when he tells her he plans to move to an independent school. The action cuts swiftly to a horny Hornchuch encounter between the voracious Michelle and the prematurely ejaculating Graham; as the randy maths teacher humiliates her partner, we realise the one-night stand is a means of avenging herself on the faithless Nick.
The off-stage drama is finally resolved in the third section, set in a Devon garden, where 58-year-old Anne breaks the pattern of platonic holidays with 42-year-old Robert, a colleague of all the previous characters.
Eldridge's point is that for teachers it's peculiarly difficult to harmonise public and private lives. They're meant to be moral guardians, yet they are subject to as much sexual confusion as the taught. You see this most clearly in the biliously brilliant middle section, where professional duties invade the bedroom. Michelle is a female Don Juan who regards her lovers as so many mathematical conquests; the shyly inexperienced Graham, who runs the school's Combined Cadet Force, plays the role of a wounded combatant.
Eldridge is extremely good on the devouring nature of teaching. I am less persuaded by his attempt to link the action to cosmic violence. The first scene takes place at the time of the IRA docklands bombing; in the final scene Anne has a long speech describing an aunt's romantic attachment to a first world war soldier. But although Anne's male chum suggests that "most of what's happened in the last 80 years has been because of that dreadful war", it's too big an issue to launch so late in the action.
But this is still an absorbing play, directed with cool precision by Rufus Norris and finely acted by the three couples. Justin Salinger and Samantha Edmonds invest their kitchen encounter with a sense of danger, Lisa Palfrey and Jonathan Cullen romp exquisitely in the bedroom, and Sheila Hancock and Stanley Townsend subtly suggest that mature teachers are best equipped to learn a lesson in romantic love.
• Until October 7. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
