Review: 'Caroline's Kitchen' cooks up an eve of destruction

Not that there’s any nuclear bomb or runaway meteor heading toward the cheery London kitchen — in the home of a celebrated television chef — that gives the play its title. Though an increasingly ominous thunderstorm is raging outside, terminally self-centered humanity is the real agent of destruction here.

I hope I haven’t misled you into expecting an “Avengers”-style epic of stylized violence. (The body count of “Caroline’s Kitchen” is modest, and there is only limited bloodshed.) Betts’ play belongs instead to a genre much loved in Britain, in which domestic comedy explodes into a feral free-for-all.

Alan Ayckbourn’s plays about hapless middle-class souls succumbing to moral chaos remain the gold standard for this form. But Betts, whose “Invincible” was part of Brits Off Broadway two years ago, has little of Ayckbourn’s patience with and compassion for characters who consistently do the wrong thing.

The principal figures in “Caroline’s Kitchen,” directed as a noisy clash of egos by Alastair Whatley, can all list reasons for their bad behavior. These include severe mental disorders, unloving parents, marital codependency, a disabled child, a brother killed in Afghanistan and terminal illness. Nonetheless, Betts, their stern creator, is excusing none of them.

First among unlovable equals here is Caroline (Caroline Langrishe), the host of a popular cooking show filmed from her home. (James Perkins designed the enviably cozy set, which is destined to be thoroughly trashed; Chris Withers did the evermore nightmarish lighting, with sound effects to match by Max Pappenheim.)

Caroline shares her life with her whiny, lascivious banker husband, Mike (Aden Gillett). Tonight there’s to be a celebration honoring the couple’s son, Leo (Tom England), who has recently graduated with laurels from Cambridge University.

To his parents’ dismay, Leo returns spouting ideals about helping Syrian refugees as well as doomsday prophecies about our endangered planet. (He also has a burning personal secret, which is not hard to guess.) The 60-something, hypochondriacal Mike has a more personal sense of extinction, predicting his own imminent deterioration and death.

As for Caroline, she’s a devout Christian in a state of advanced denial about everything, including her own drinking problem. By the end, even she is reduced to lamenting loudly, as thunderclaps and winds buffet her windows, “We have gained the world but lost our souls.”

The road to this tragicomic climax — which, be warned, finally makes use of a sharp and gleaming kitchen knife that is introduced in the opening moments — is paved with betrayal, deception and a general refusal to hear what anyone else has to say. Everybody rants; nobody listens. And conversation is less a dialogue than a series of colliding monologues.

These come not only from Caroline’s immediate family, but also from her snippy, cocaine-snorting assistant — Amanda (Jasmyn Banks), whose mother recently died after a long siege of multiple sclerosis — and the hunky handyman, Graeme (James Sutton), who worships the patrician Caroline. Then there’s Graeme’s unstable wife, Sally (Elizabeth Boag), who makes a surprise visit to this unhappy household on the day she has decided to go off her meds.

This careful recipe for disaster winds up feeling as overcooked as the roast that’s drying up in the oven throughout the show. Langrishe has the hard-smiling domestic diva persona down cold. And Caroline’s rare moments of stricken, wondering silence — when self-knowledge seems to be whispering in her ear — are the production’s most poignant, and the funniest.

Mostly, though, it’s hard to care about these damned souls. Their farcical gyrations are frenzied but rarely truly funny. And you realize anew that for comedy to be fully effective, it has to elicit empathy as well as schadenfreude.

Betts would seem to be taking a more dispassionate God’s eye view, in which the divisions within a single home are revealed to mirror the blind, selfish individualism destroying an entire nation. At one point, one character asks another whether they could start a new life together, “away from this broken country, away from all this unhappiness.”

Sorry, chum, but no. It’s Judgment Day in the determinist world of “Caroline’s Kitchen,” which means your last chances for happiness have all been used up.

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Production Notes

“Caroline’s Kitchen”

Tickets: Through May 25 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 646-892-7999, 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Credits: By Torben Betts; directed by Alastair Whatley; designed by James Perkins; lighting by Chris Withers; music and sound by Max Pappenheim; AEA stage manager, Taylor Mankowski; company stage manager, Felix Dunning; fight director, Jeremy Barlow. Presented by Original Theater Company, Ghost Light Theater and Eilene Davidson.

Cast: Jasmyn Banks (Amanda), Elizabeth Boag (Sally), Tom England (Leo), Aden Gillett (Mike), Caroline Langrishe (Caroline) and James Sutton (Graeme).

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.