Solipsistic jerks. That’s one critic’s succinct description of the kind of characters Jesse Eisenberg plays on screen. (It may exclude his recent gig as Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman... or then again...) It’s therefore no surprise, although something of a disappointment, that Ben, his character in his West End stage début The Spoils, is an s.j. of the first water. He’s the kind of spoilt (ah), self-aggrandising twentysomething New York brat who mistakes insults for jokes and more insults for integrity. Luckily, he has an eastern saint of a Nepalese flatmate, and an old school chum who’s too dim and trusting to take any offence at any of his barbs. However, when said classmate reveals himself to be engaged to Ben’s lifelong secret unrequited love, only prodigious amounts of booze and dope can get him through all their social evenings together. Matters escalate; cue more solipsism, and of course more jerkery.

Does Eisenberg not feel the urge to break out of this type? Evidently not, as he wrote the piece in addition to appearing in it. It’s his third play, although his first to cross the Atlantic (with Scott Elliott directing here as he did off-Broadway); apparently the previous two have not exactly been devoid of s’ing and j’ing either. He has a keen ear for character dialogue, but a woolly imagination for actual character or plot. All that happens here is that folk get together, talk and irk each other. Oh, but right at the end Ben is given a redeeming virtue back in his past, as if this made him a rounded, complex character rather than simply the kind of stereotype that drove all the laziest U.S. screen dramas and comedies of the latter 20th century to their sentimental, affirmative-at-all-costs conclusions.

Kunal Nayyar and Annapurna Sriram travel over from the New York cast, joined by Katie Brayben and Alfie Allen, the latter of whom excels as inadvertently long-suffering classmate Ted. But this evening follows on from the West End playwriting/acting debuts of Zach Braff in 2012 and Matthew Perry earlier this year as... well, I’ll leave you to supply the relevant jerk-related term yourself.

Written for the Financial Times.