Hysteria, Komedia, Brighton, until May 27

1:12pm Friday 25th May 2007

The disastrous dinner date, you might think, is a pretty obvious scenario when it comes to writing modern comedy. For one it's the perfect microcosm in which to exploit the indignities of 30-something angst. With all that formality and fragile china, the potential for slapstick, too, must be irresistible.

But this three-hander from Inspector Sands and Stamping Ground Theatre proves wonderfully novel thanks to its unique theatricality (you won't be hit by a flying banana skin - twice, in fact - while watching Bridget Jones's diary) and a zany intelligence which draws a link between first date nerves and our contemporary global unease.

"I came by the pub with the, er" falters the woman as she tries to explain her lateness. "The crispy ducks?" guesses the man from her inarticulately flapping hands. "The nail-bombings!" she eventually exclaims, to their rapidly receding relief.

Desperately seeking love in a world where gunfire and screams have become indistinguishable from ringtones, Giulia Innocenti and Ben Lewis's frazzled hopefuls come together in the restaurant from hell.

Its gatekeeper is Lucinka Eisler's androgynous waiter, a chronic OCD sufferer for whom joyless ritual and soul-sapping precision (the laying of the table is a masterclass in subtle physical comedy) are the only way to shut out his apolcalyptic internal monologue.

The couple are prone to some classic mistakes. "Do you want to be buried or cremated?" asks the man in return for some benign questions about his first album and favourite colour. "We could adopt an African child called Kwame," blurts the woman as her expectations spiral hormonally, "and put his letters on our fridge!"

But it doesn't help when the menus are works of complex origami, the large party at the next table are having noisy, effortless fun, and the waiter is running circles round your table with a bottle of antiseptic spray.

Resorting to their own quirky coping mechanisms, the man, a social scientist, periodically escapes from the table to lecture us on "the modern condition", defining conditions such as "Affluenza" and waving a photo of a monkey so starved of company it attacked its own hand.

When he goes to the toilet, the woman gorges on a banana with such practised relish that comfort eating becomes a cabaret act. Much is accomplished with taped sound effects and towards the end you will actually hear a psyche crumble.

Managing to be both immensely slick and immensely sweet, Hysteria leaves you torn between respectful admiration and wanting to give the performers a big hug. The opening of an invisible bottle of champagne, meanwhile, is worth the ticket price alone.

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