Richard Greenberg's play, the last of the Donmar's American Imports season, is cool but lyrical, emotional but sardonic, deeply intelligent but scathingly witty. Ah, New York, New York. This is a play about generations: with Act I set in the 1990s, the three actors return in Act II as their own parents in the 1960s. It is also a play about inheritances, both financial and emotional, it being understood that emotional debts are just as crippling, and the interest rate rises as you get older. In Act I Walker
and Nan (Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern), children of Ned, a successful architect, meet to sort out their dead father's huge legacy. Also present, Pip (David Morrissey), son of Ned's partner, who died young. Why? How? Ned's journal gives no clues. Act II both illuminates and darkens the story. The older generation is less laid-back, less complicated, more innocent; it has more will and instinct and therefore less self-knowledge. Whatever the younger generation have lost, it is not quite paradise. The writing is brilliantly but unostentatiously witty, dense but not thick with ideas. Robin Lefevre's direction is immaculately paced: it is tense, but it gives the characters time to think and the words pace to resonate. The three actors work with coruscating intelligence and confident, spellbinding ease. Can ease be spellbinding? I urge you, go and see.
 

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