There's nothing like a high school reunion in your late-30s to whisk you back to teenage insecurities, or make you feel like an adult screw-up.
As one character says: "It's the age of shit showing up and bad choices seeking their consequences."
Into this heightened state of vulnerability, playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins throws in The Grim Reaper, who by turns inhabits the five bodies meeting on Ursula's (Tamara Lawrence) porch for a pre-reunion slug of her potent 'jungle juice'.
Speaking in echo-reverb, Death makes it clear they are here "for work".
But while pot and booze-fuelled fights, sexual revelations and long held grudges ensue, the implied explosive climax never arrives.
Rather Jacobs and director Eric Ting deliver a layered, thoughtful, funny, meditation on friendship, mid-life and mortality post-Pandemic, when we were all closer to death and perhaps a little nicer.
At school they were in a gang of misfits, the self-titled Multi-Ethnic Reject Group. Now Ursula is struggling with diabetes which has cost her an eye, Kristina (Katie Leung) with a drinking problem, high powered job and five children, Caitlin (Yolanda Kettle) with a stultifying marriage to an older man, and war veteran Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley) with PTSD.
It is Berlin-based conceptual artist Emilio (Anthony Welsh) who appears the most successful, yet he too seems dislocated and dissatisfied.
The ensemble cast are uniformly good - Leung does a hilarious turn as a tightly controlled woman letting go, and Welsh is by turns waspish and poignantly vulnerable.
Jacobs-Jenkins sprinkles historical context into their compelling exchanges. This generation of Millennials have lived through 911, shifting gender roles and notions of consent, high school and racial shootings, and the polarised politics of January 6.
Their own messy confusion is mirrored in the country whose flag flutters on Ursula's porch.
Neither in nor out, it's a liminal space of sharing and confession.
But this melancholy, metaphysical drama is also not quite one thing or another. It's pace ebbs and flows, and it's perhaps deliberately elusive tone and downbeat ending feels frustratingly unresolved.
The Comeuppance runs at The Almeida Theatre Islington until 18 May.
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