It’s 25 years since Carol saw her four best friends from school. Now it’s her 40th birthday and she’s throwing a reunion party at her plush Hampstead home. Will it be a celebration to remember, or will the birthday cake prove bitter and the champagne flat?

Well, it’s no great surprise that the raking over of old memories raises tensions and long-nursed grudges. There’s nothing very original about this buoyant drama by the actor, writer and comedian Angie Le Mar and a great deal wrong with it. The plot is full of holes: does the successful career woman Carol have no newer friends she’d rather invite to such a milestone party? If the women were so close, why have none of them spoken in more than two decades?

There’s also something formulaic about the way in which each character’s problems represent a different political issue. But the piece is so sweet and salty, and Karena Johnson’s production so sassy, that you ignore the flaws and enjoy the ride.

You know the play is going to be laced with mischievous humour when Jennifer (Carol Moses), a radical Black Power firebrand at school, arrives wearing a burka and a pious expression. Joke over and veil whipped away, she settles in with the others for an evening of bitching and soul-baring. Ribald laughter is offset by revelations of domestic violence, homophobia and racial tension, along with well-worn anxieties about biological clocks.

Such a catalogue of cliché would become irritating were it not for the verve with which it is served up. Le Mar as the tough-talking Sandra and Moses as the volatile Jennifer are edgily hilarious. Orlessa Altass discreetly suggests the emotional mess beneath Carol’s elegant exterior. And while Ellen O’Grady as mixed-race Mandy, torn between her pretensions of superiority and her yearning to belong, is still the group’s tolerated outsider, Catherine Hammond’s Joyce, rangy with epic eyelashes, touchingly conveys the quirkiness and kindness that once made her the school oddball and now make her the posse member with the most secure sense of self. It’s overfamiliar stuff, but the production makes this girls’ night in worth going out for.

Box office: 020-8985 2424. Until Aug 17 2008

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