Went with Owen tonight to see Christopher Hampton's fifth play TREATS at the Garrick.

Backdrop: In 1971 Hampton adapted Ibsen's A DOLL'S HOUSE for a Broadway production starring Claire Bloom. It nightly inspired bravos and applause from the Women's Lib-friendly audiences at the scene where Nora walked out on her marriage at the end of the play. This set him thinking about a recent experience concerning the director of his previous plays Robert Kidd and his then partner Jane Asher. Kidd had been directing MACBETH in America and realised how bad he had been to her and on his return made up his mind to propose. When he arrived home he found she had already moved in with Gerald Scarfe. Hampton then thought but what if the woman couldn't leave the bad relationship? Five years later TREATS opened at the Royal Court Theatre (before transferring to the west end) with Stephen Moore as the new lover, James Bolam as the ex.... and Jane Asher directed by Robert Kidd! How civilised theatre people can be.

As with TOTAL ECLIPSE last week, TREATS was a play I had only ever read before so was keen to see it live (read that however you wish) on stage. While not as badly staged as ECLIPSE Laurence Boswell is not my most favourite of directors so again I was left feeling that the full worth of the text wasn't mined - oh and Billie Piper was off tonight so the usual dynamic of this three-hander was slightly off-kilter. About 10 minutes in I started to feel for Owen, he was being subjected to another play about unsympathetic people!

Ann and Patrick's quiet evening at home is shattered by the arrival of Dave her ex who breaks in, punches Patrick and refuses to leave until Ann explains why he has been replaced by Patrick while away working as a reporter in Iraq. He turns up the next morning and convinces Patrick to invite him round to dinner that night. A miserable evening is had by all as Dave continues to belittle Patrick and Ann in each other's eyes. The next morning Patrick apologises to Ann for his wimpish behaviour but she has her own admission: he was a rebound romance and she wants him out. A week later Dave turns up again to return the rug Ann had let him have and Dave suggests they make love one last time. She agrees only for Dave to physically attack her and tell her to call once she makes her mind up what she wants. After a night of anguish she calls the number. Two weeks later in a mirror image of the first scene Patrick breaks in and demands to know what is going on only this time Ann turns on him and violently orders him out of her life. He leaves but Ann runs after him. Dave is left alone staring at the door. The door opens and Ann returns, they sit on the couch in silence and Dave withdraws from her when she attempts to touch him.

It's always good when the rug is pulled totally from under the audience and the scene where Dave attacks Ann as you think he's about to make love to her certainly did that - the shock was audible. After that the witty barbed comedy you thought was playing out turns icy cold and the unsettling unresolved ending leaves a bitter taste.

The trouble is that Hampton always invests his darker characters with the better lines so Kris Marshall as Dave has no trouble making the evening his as the manipulative Dave. His is a swaggering performance which really makes the outcome of the tussle never in doubt. Interestingly Hampton had wanted the unknown Jonathan Pryce to play this role in the '76 production but he lost out to the more bankable James Bolam who Hampton thought never managed Pryce's feel of lurking danger.

Laurence Fox certainly shines as Patrick in his scenes of gormlessness as Dave runs verbal rings around him and is genuinely touching in the scene when told by Ann she wants to end the relationship, his painstaking attempts to return the front-door key lengthening the torture. But where is his voice? Father Edward should really give him the secrets of his cut-glass Windsor diction as his son's croaky delivery here made a lot of his lines hard to make out - and we were in the centre halfway back!

Antonina Lewis was on for the absent Piper and though okay was a little too stagey in her delivery which stood out against Marshall's on-the-nose delivery and Fox's croaky mumbling. It doesn't help that the character of Ann in the first scenes has only a handful of lines and ultimately is never a character you fully understand the psychology of. At one point after the dinner party she erupts in anger that the men assume she would want to be with either one or the other of them. But Hampton drops this strand and that is exactly the situation.

Here too were early signs of Hampton's awareness of the damage lovers can do each other verbally which later came to fruition in his masterpiece LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES where again the glitteringly evil characters of Valmont and Merteuil have the best lines and scenes but where again the rug is pulled from under the audience when they realise that the enjoyment had by them makes the audience complicit in their actions.

I am grateful for having seen these two early plays of Christopher Hampton - even TREATS was written when he was 29 - but on reflection my admiration for him is based on his later work such as TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD, LES LIAISONS, CARRINGTON, WHITE CHAMELEON which all have one thing these plays lack - a humanity.