“We’re not bad people!” wails playwright Theo towards the climax of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s latest play. No, but they have some responsibility for bad things happening, in an An Inspector Calls kind of way. Campbell hasn’t written them badly, either, but similarly he must face up to his role in their shortcomings.

Aspiring playwright Theo and his wife Charlotte are staying in a cottage they have rented on a Greek island; against their better judgement, they have invited over acquaintances Harvey – some kind of spook for the U.S. Department of State – and June, who is fond of a drink or several. Harvey persuades the Brits to buy the cottage, orating that somehow this chimes with his love and defence of freedom and democracy. At the end of the act, news breaks of the colonels’ coup in Athens: it is 1967. After the interval, it is 1976, Harvey is disturbed by how his values have worked in practice, especially in Chile, and Theo and Charlotte are about to sell up. Arguments ensue over both the particular and the general.

When the sale of the cottage was first mentioned, I wondered whether this was to be a metaphor for the Greek economy’s more recent travails. In Act Two, it became apparent that Campbell’s net is cast far wider, at neoliberalism in general. The argument is that cultural appropriation, whether of rebetiko music for silly pseudo-Greek dancing or of entire political economies to reflect one’s own values, is a bad thing, but that we are all imperialists in our way.

Campbell is a sensitive and articulate playwright who does not shy away from tackling major issues. In fact, perhaps he needs a bit of shying: here, as in earlier plays such as The Pride and The Faith Machine, there is a point at which he simply has his characters come right out and say it, “it” being their stance on the major theme in question. Despite Simon Godwin’s canny production, actors of the calibre of Ben Miles and Elizabeth McGovern as the Americans and Sam Crane and Pippa Nixon as the English couple, can do little to avoid becoming mouthpieces, and occasionally strident ones at that.

Written for the Financial Times.