Dinner, National Theatre Loft, London

A meagre offering

There's a venerable tradition, in plays and films, of serving up a purposefully perverted hot meal as a gastronomic way of getting even. Think of Titus Andronicus regaling his enemy with a pie that brims with the meat of her butchered sons, or of Michael Gambon forced to ingest a forkful of the tastefully presented corpse of Alan Howard in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Paige, the posh bitch protagonist of Dinner, Moira Buffini's highly entertaining new play, is the latest host who wants to put the extra "s" into "just desserts". Only it's stomach-turningly instructive symbolism rather than cannibalism that's on the menu, and it's not just her victims for whom Paige feels what could be termed a consuming hatred.

The occasion is a dinner party in honour of her husband, Lars (Nicholas Farrell), a smooth bastard who is at the top of the bestseller list with a book, entitled – more suitably than he'd ever realise – Beyond Belief. This sub-Nietzschean pop text lends bogus intellectual glamour to a ruthless philosophy of selfishness. Given that we are no better than microbes, you have to decide whether to eat or be eaten. There's no heaven for the meek to inherit, so become the god or goddess of your own psyche. That sort of thing. Three guests have fought through the fog to this celebration – Hal (Adrian Rawlins), a microbiologist who cruelly divorced Paige's best friend and has come with her replacement, sexy newsbabe Sian (Catherine McCormack), and a bohemian eroticist painter, Wynne (a wonderfully earnest Penny Downie) who has just dumped her partner.

This leaves an empty place – which piques Paige who has planned the evening with minute precision, even down to hiring a waiter from an obscure internet site for the suspiciously exorbitant fee of £25,000. But the attendees have barely begun to imbibe the starter, Primordial Soup (a briny reminder, in a world of excess, that we were once "such persistent slime"), than an unexpected newcomer arrives in the shape of Mike (Paul Rattray), a young van driver who has crashed his vehicle into the gatepost of the Lodge. Claiming to be a thief who has burgled the neighbouring house, he provides the outsider's perspective on this bunch of hollow, middle-class fakes. But then so, ironically, in her bibulous, elegantly self-hating way, does Paige – which is why, somewhat predictably, the two gravitate towards each other.

Fiona Buffini's beautifully focused production provides a feast of fine acting. Harriet Walter is magnificent as Paige. She persuades you that this poor little rich bitch, wasting in an empty world of personal grooming and token charity work, is a genuinely tragic figure. But I enjoyed the play's battery of amusing jokes more than I admired the deployment of its broad thesis. Lars is such a monster that he constitutes a soft target, while Mike emerges as an over-conveniently decent and articulate working-class adversary. Could it be that Dinner is rather like a Chinese meal – delicious while you're eating it, but with no staying power?

To 14 Dec (020-7452 3000)