One bad guy, four of his exes and a bunch of narcissists

had an affair and left to deal with the fallout of a betrayed husband and a destroyed reputation alone.

But running is what Guy does best. He did it from wild party-girl Tyler (RoxannePallett)inChicago,andBobbi (Carley Stenson) in LA, with whom he may still be in love. “I’ll bet hurt is your number one by-product,” she tells him.

The challenge of LaBute’s play is portraying women in a way that doesn’t only define them as victims. Gary Condes’s slick production largely sidesteps that mantrap with four terrifically nuanced performances by the female cast, and one by Charles Dorfman who as the archetypal Guy (note the gender encapsulating name) captures the duplicitous essence of male bad behaviour. His every attempt to salve old wounds end up rubbing salt into them. Dorfman’s Guy administers the treatment with a butterwouldn’t-melt sincerity that will make many a man shift with shame. Royal Court

LIGHT CAN be elusive. Not the kind you switch on, but that which appears of its own volition. The stuff that, in this madcap comedy about a film crew, Matt Smith’s movie director Maxim yearns to capture; the kind that can change a mood, create an atmosphere or, in a fleeting moment even evoke the eternal answer to the meaning of life, as Maxim puts it.

And true enough, in the final flourish of Anthony Neilson’s production, many of these qualities are evoked in a way that feels truly profound.

Or, rather, it would if this play were not entirely populated by a bunch of complete narcissists.

Maxim’s childish tantrums, and his crude attempts at attracting sympathy by pretending he has asthma is not the half of it. His producer (Amanda Drew) treats her cinematographer lover (Richard Pyros) like an unpaid male prostitute, though his behaviour is no less self-serving when he encourages the sacking of Maxim so that he can take over as director. All are as selfless as Gandhi, however, next to Jonjo O’Neill’s grotesque Hungarian film star.

Think of the German actor Klaus Kinski — half artist, half psychopath — and you won’t be too far from the epic vanity of O’Neill’s version of this archetype — a violent, loose-cannon prone to expressions of grandiosity and selfsacrifice all bound up in a messiah complex bigger than Jesus’s.

All this is terrific fun to watch, and there’s no doubting the talent of the cast and director/ Some Girl(s) creator whose previous works about the human psyche have proved that Neilson has one of the more fertile and febrile imaginations at work in the theatre. But the play, devised in the rehearsal room, gives its cast licence to corpse at their own hilarity, and ad-lib. They do this apparently unaware that they are indulging in the kind of narcissism their show is intended to parody. Most fatal of all is that the story has no significance beyond its own characters. Smith — surely the most watchable Dr Who of recent times — almost manages to be likeable.

But t here i s a sense here that ever yone involved is reaching for something deeper and more enriching, q u a l i t i e s t h a t prove as elusive as a certain kind of light.