Excuses! Soho Theatre, London

Bridging the baby gap

There's pre-millennial and post-millennial, AD and BC. But such watersheds pale into insignificance compared to the pre-baby and post-baby divide in any parent's life. The import of that indescribable upheaval is reflected in the drolly drastic structure of Excuses!, an entertaining and refreshingly incorrect Catalan comedy by Joel Joan and Jordi Sanchez. Adapted by Gordon Anderson for ATC and receiving its English premiere in David Grindley's sparky production, it focuses on two yuppie couples, purportedly best friends, and two dinner parties, one without a wailing baby as cabaret, the other with.

On the first occasion, Olivia (Doon Mackichan) has been planning to announce her pregnancy over diner à deux at Nobu. She arrives home, however, to find that Matthew (Alistair Petrie) is cooking sole stew and awaiting the arrival of the other pair for a hastily-arranged supper. The male pals are architects, but where Matthew is constitutionally ineffectual, Alexis Conran's enjoyably reprehensible Christian is a thrusting networker with designs on New York, and a compulsive skirt-chaser.

The authors have a good nose for the rueful intimacies of unequal male friendship. When guilt-ridden Matthew maintains that at least he always finishes a masturbation session with a mental picture of Olivia, no-nonsense Christian says "So what? Sometimes I do." It's characteristic that the news of the pregnancy is upstaged by a mobile phone farce, with Matthew forced to pretend that calls from Christian's latest conquest are coming from an long-lost college friend who wants to meet up that evening and, being gay, insists on keeping it "a kind of like guy thing". As Christian asserts that the foetus is just an irritating and easily abortable obstruction to forming a business partnership with Matthew, his own live-in relationship with the name-dropping, careerist, but obscurely broody Suzanna (Robin Weaver) begins to unravel at a rate of knots.

The second act jumps to the baby's sixth month. Bearing a bottle of Montrachet 1967 for the godson he has not yet bothered to see, Christian is, in fact, stalking his now ex-partner, who is visiting from LA. The play proceeds to offer a hilarious cartoon of the chasm between those embroiled in the war of parenthood and nonplussed, vomit-dodging civilians. It also shrewdly dramatises the way that overweening middle-class concern for baby progress can just be the continuation of marital strife by other means. During a ghastly takeaway meal, Christian and Suzanna keep being left to their own uneasy devices while one or other of the parents trips off to pacify the screaming child with a story. Or parts of a story: "He's left out the bit about the black paw," exclaims the indignant Suzanna who, like the rest of us, can hear the offstage story-telling over the baby alarm. So off she goes to make sure her son is not mentally stunted by Matthew's skipping.

True, the piece is too contrived (Suzanna's hysterectomy is a convenience); perpetuates the idea that men are irredeemably non-child-oriented; and the English adaptation manages to make a Catalan play sound like the work of a thirtysomething Ayckbourn. But the lively jokes cause many winces of recognition (Matthew's lengthy retreats to the lavatory, using psychosomatic constipation as a kind of escape from the parental hurly burly, rang loud bells with me). And I loved the way the breezily-destructive Christian could be relied on to say precisely the wrong thing. Justifying their decision to stick with one child, the couple piously explain that they don't want him to go without anything. "Well," chips back their chum, "he'll be going without a brother". Worth the trip - if you can get a babysitter.

To 10 January (020-7478 0100)