Even given that Wallace Shawn’s plays subtly articulate the guilty conscience of upper-middle-class liberal New York, his new one still contains more than meets the eye. His breakthrough play The Fever (1990) served as an indictment of social complacency atop a global culture dependent on war and tourism; now Evening At The Talk House places a similar comfortable group amid a world of mass entertainment and targeted murder.

For the first half-hour, however, it seems instead to be a vapid series of nostalgic laments for the old days, as writer Robert and a group of old chums meet at the eponymous Talk House club for a ten-year reunion after a flop play. When Robert encounters has-been actor Dick, who explains his facial bruises as the result of “a short battering. You know. Informal,” it at first seems bizarrely comical. Yet as the group’s conversation progresses, it becomes apparent that this is a world in which a “Programme of Murdering” is routine: enemies of society are identified and taken out, by bomb or by more direct methods. The targets are not just potential terrorists, but anyone of dissident views or with too big and impolitic a mouth, and several of the group have engaged in “targeting” by processing personal profiles, or even in murders themselves. This debate and accounts of similar but non-governmental killings interweave casually, grotesquely, with the media folk’s talk of sitcoms and gory clip shows, who’s in and who’s out; the participants’ earnestness is repeatedly supplanted by easy, silvery laughter. And beneath it all is our knowledge as viewers that the world of the play is not quite fantastical enough to deny that it is our own.

Shawn’s writing calls for a certain self-consciousness of delivery, and director Ian Rickson gets his cast to walk the delicate line between this and naturalism. The author himself plays Dick, the truth-teller of the circle, who will surely not survive long past the evening shown. The other stand-out performance in the cast of eight is from Sinead Matthews as Jane, the club assistant who was previously involved in the Programme of Murdering and also in Robert’s bed. It is a deeply unsettling portrait of our individual and collective collaboration with the amorality of the 21st century. The past was better.

Written for the Financial Times.