Two successive evenings watching plays which have graduated from the Hampstead Theatre’s downstairs tryout space, and what a contrast in quality. Peter Souter’s Hello/Goodbye centres on a heterosexual couple where Amelia Bullmore’s Di And Viv And Rose is about a trio of female friends, but both plays focus on the same psychological and emotional territory: how folk meet, form close personal bonds and ultimately sunder, or not, over the years. Both are comedy/dramas, working principally through laughs but striving for poignancy as well. And Bullmore hits all the targets Souter aims at and several others which do not even occur to him.
    
Only Tamzin Outhwaite survives from the Hampstead production of two years ago to this deserved West End transfer: on first appearance, one expects her sporty lesbian Di to be the most predictable of the characters, but little by little she becomes the most unfussily rounded. Jenna Russell’s sweet, boy-hungry Rose is easy to like, as she should be, and Samantha Spiro is, as ever, a joy to watch for the laughter, flint and paradoxical vulnerability with which she imbues determined sociologist Viv. When these three move into a student house together in 1983, a tripartite friendship begins which Bullmore follows through episodically to 2010.
    
For every arguable flaw – an absence of any real sense of the world beyond the trio, a skimming-over in too-brief scenes of some of the later stages in the relationship – there is a countervailing unexpected richness, such as Bullmore’s immensely sympathetic treatment of rape which nevertheless refuses to follow the prescribed path of irreparable trauma. The way the three women come together in mutual support and sustenance at this point is beautifully conveyed in a dialogue-free scene in which they build a shared “den” in their living room, to the accompaniment of Robert Wyatt’s version of “Shipbuilding”, a song thematically quite unrelated but whose plangent mood and arrangement underscore the action heartrendingly. Anna Mackmin’s production makes finely-judged use of period music throughout, but this for me is its zenith, eclipsing the women’s earlier celebratory stomp to Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way”. Though not at all obtrusively sentimental, this is a play that makes you want to hug it long and hard.
    
Written for the Financial Times.