Canvas, Chichester Festival Theatre / Children's Children, Almeida, review The piece has been ingeniously designed by Jonathan Fensom so that we see both the exterior and the cosy interior of the luxury tents, and there are lively and often richly comic performances from the six characters, and from Lisa Palfrey as the hilariously flustered Welsh proprietor of the site. It has to be said that the play feels more than a touch formulaic. All three couples have secret troubles that are slowly revealed in the course of the evening. And director Angus Jackson needs to accelerate the pace and cut some of the flabbier lines from the script. Elliot Levey is wonderfully funny and touching as the besotted husband of an appallingly bossy teacher (a splendidly grotesque Sarah Hadland), who treats adults like primary school children. Lucy Montgomery and Dean Lennox Kelly prove highly sympathetic as a couple nearing the end of their rope as the recession bites, while Oliver Milburn and Hattie Ledbury are hilariously smug as an upwardly mobile pair whose marriage isn't quite as blissful as they pretend. The piece really comes to life in the climactic third act when all the simmering resentments finally come to the boil. It's an entertaining evening, despite passages that feel both prolix and derivative. In contrast, Matthew Dunster's Children's Children seems merely unpleasant. There isn't a single character you warm to in this story of a successful TV presenter and his failed actor friend to whom he implausibly lends a cool £250,000. There is also a disconcerting misanthropy in Dunster's writing, coupled with long, tedious lectures about the damage humans are inflicting on the environment. It is strange how people who want to save the world so often seem to despise the people that inhabit it. There are lively performances, especially from Darrell D'Silva as the TV star overtaken by disgrace, Trevor Fox as his sponging friend and newcomer Emily Berrington as a self-obsessed fashion model. Her scenes of gratuitous nudity seem like a desperate attempt to give this dull, cynical and often downright incompetent play at least a flicker of prurient interest. Canvas: 01243 781312; Children's Children: 020 7359 4404