A new play by Michael Frayn is always an event, and here are a couple of dozen of them, published last year as a collection of short plays which Frayn had written over the years but done nothing with. To be honest, “short plays” does seem a little grand for pieces lasting less than five minutes or so each; they are sketches, and this evening constitutes an attempted revival of the now neglected form of “intimate revue”.

The Hampstead auditorium has been reconfigured in the round, so that on most sides there are only three or four rows of audience surrounding the circular playing area. As if we didn’t already feel involved enough, at various points some of the half-dozen performers come and sit amongst us, palpate us as if we were vegetables in a supermarket or wrap an implausibly long phone cable around our heads. Nina Wadia seems particularly fond of trying to corpse her chosen civilian victims; for once Mark Hadfield’s natural clowning is on a rather tighter rein.

Frayn is a consummate writer of intelligent comedy, and director Hamish McColl approaches the material with an entirely fitting blend of professionalism and playfulness. However, the more or less fortuitous assemblage does not always do the playwright justice. He has a fine ear for assorted jargons – the meaningless burble of award shows, or the way mathematics sounds to the lay ear – but when he gets on to his second or third piece about a canting politician it begins to feel like an easy preoccupation. (Contrast with “A Stiff Drink”, which looks like a parody of a Pinterian torture scene but sounds wonderfully like a parody, rather, of academic dissections of Pinter’s work.)

Some subjects simply seem hackneyed: the garrulous woman on the phone, the couple who can’t stop chattering on their mobiles. But he also supplies material mocking the evening itself, such as a memorial service for the recently departed interval and an Attenboroughesque wildlife study of sceneshifters. There is plenty to admire and enjoy, but much of its value is because Frayn has already impressed us rather than because he does so here.
  
Written for the Financial Times.