The words “Neil LaBute” and “romcom” go together like peaches and bream. The American playwright’s abiding interests are masculinity, selfish betrayal and the power of superficiality. When, therefore, his 2008 play Reasons To Be Pretty showed its male protagonist behaving with decency and compassion, LaBute soon felt compelled to write a corrective sequel to it. This production not only revisits the same characters three or four years on, but also largely reproduces the earlier play’s 2011 UK première at the Almeida: same director (Michael Attenborough), same designer (Soutra Gilmour) and pretty much the same design (with indoor sets folding out of a large freight container), plus the same actor, Tom Burke, playing the central figure of Greg. All that has changed is the venue.

Greg is waylaid in a car park by his ex Steph, incensed that he is now dating her best friend Carly. (The fourth wheel of this clunky carriage is Carly’s ex-husband and Greg’s old friend Kent.) Little by little Greg falls into an affair with Steph, but finds himself unable to choose between the two women. This being LaBute, it is Greg, the thoughtful, literary one, whose compulsive contemplation and attempts to find a way of doing the right thing without hurting anyone result in his behaving like an A1 bastard to both; his sense of obligation to be utterly honest leads to him tying himself in semantic knots that mean nothing substantive anyway. Burke’s Greg is nicely (i.e. infuriatingly) semi-detached, hammering out his thoughts and feelings with himself rather than those around him; no wonder Lauren O’Neil’s Steph is driven so often to screaming rage, yet even that fails to penetrate.

LaBute is a master at writing this kind of (to an audience) transparently self-justifying flim-flam; however, the more characteristic the material is, the more we’ve heard it before. Reasons To Be Pretty began as the third play in a trilogy about obsession with physical looks, but has now become the first in another trilogy following this put-upon quartet. Here’s hoping that the forthcoming Reasons To Be Pretty Happy re-breaks the mould into which the material of …Happy seems to have fallen.

Written for the Financial Times.