A playground fight involving two eleven-year-old boys escalates into drawing room warfare when one of the mothers calls a conference with the other set of parents.

Veronica (Elizabeth McGovern) is a right-on, politically correct, left wing seeker of truth and justice.

She also sees her son as the victim, as he’s the one who lost two teeth in the fight.

Her husband Michael (Nigel Lindsay) is more pragmatic about the incident, but initially backs her resolve to elicit an apology from Annette and Alan (Samantha Spiro and Simon Paisley Day), the parents of the other boy.

Alan, a lawyer, is clearly at the meeting under protest and sees the whole matter as trivial.

He spends most of the time on his mobile phone discussing an urgent problem with a pharmaceutical client.

Layer by layer the veneer of civilisation erodes as parenting practices are raised and it occurs to Alan and Annette to question what provoked their son to hit the other boy.

The couples’ unity begins to fracture, old scars emerge and inappropriate and definitely non-PC language is employed.

Alliances are formed and broken and realigned among the foursome.

It is darkly funny, revealing the underbelly of sophistication and the precariousness of the self-righteous.

They are four individually well-honed performances.

Elizabeth McGovern is coping with the handicap of an arm in a sling following an accident.

But she did not allow it to take anything from her portrayal of the exasperating Veronica.

The stage choreography is entertaining in what is essentially a talking shop, albeit an overheated one.

Jo Bayne