Kerry Jackson: not even Fay Ripley can save this bafflingly lame comedy about class in modern Britain

At least April De Angelis’s bafflingly lame new comedy about class in modern Britain has one thing going for it: it stars Cold Feet’s Fay Ripley, as a fiftysomething, working-class Essex Tory voter running a new chi-chi tapas bar in Walthamstow, north-east London with the help of Athena, a gifted black chef.

Kerry is the sort of shameless, plain talking, self-made woman who takes a dim view of the local homeless chap Will asking for food and using her bins as a loo, which makes her an unlikely candidate for an affair with Stephen (Michael Gould), a lefty liberal widowed philosophy teacher who sports vegan shoes, and who is presumably intended to typify the lefty liberal vegan sort who lives in Walthamstow these days. Yet before long they are making eyes at each over the pimento peppers and getting frisky on Stephen’s posh kitchen table, although their odd-couple romance is soon marginally complicated by the appearance of Gavin Spoke’s proudly unreconstructed Warren, a lusty ex copper with a casual line in misogyny and racism, and a somewhat less credible penchant for collecting porcelain figurines.

De Angelis’s intention is plain, sort of: to illuminate the rotten state of Britain and its toxic polarisations, between the woke left who see everyone as blameless victims of circumstance and say mad things like “we mustn’t culture-shame”, as Stephen does when Kerry reveals her ignorance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; and the uncompromising right, such as people like Kerry, who voted Leave, and who pride themselves on getting where they are through grit and hard graft.

Yet not only is this a precariously crude and flimsy scaffold on which to hang a state-of-the-nation conversation, it’s impossible to take these people seriously when De Angelis presents them both as such blunt instruments of satire and such crass cultural ciphers. Admittedly, the play’s sympathies intriguingly lie more with Kerry than with the entirely ridiculous Stephen and his insufferably right-on snowflake daughter Alice, who on discovering her dad is behind her waitressing job at the tapas bar says to him in outrage: “You’ve dis-authenticated me”.

Yet while Ripley’s admirably lived-in performance invests Kerry with a warm, lively coarseness, Kerry is also riddled with irredeemably hateful opinions. A more egregious example of De Angelis’s characterisation-by-numbers is Madeline Appiah’s Athena, the play’s only black character and regrettably defined by her dubious immigration status, and poor Will (Michael Fox), whom De Angelis absurdly attempts to humanise by having him read Jane Austen, yet who is really only there to expose the attitudes of those more privileged, be it Kerry’s politicised lack of compassion or Stephen’s useless liberal guilt.

Indhu Rubasingham’s production indulges all the usual clichés of this sort of sitcom drama – from the revolving interiors and the scenes of Kerry and Athena tipsily dancing to Whitney Houston as a bit of light relief, to the between-scene music, redolent of the sort of soundtrack estate agents like to pair with video tours of prime estate. Granted, there is the odd good throwaway gag. But still: where are all the good plays about our crisis-ridden nation in 2022? Not at the National Theatre, that’s for sure.

Until Jan 28. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk