When the mask of civilisation slips disastrously... on the Arundel stage

Tickets are available on 07523 417926 or https://www.arundelplayers.co.uk/.

Written by Yasmina Reza and directed by Helen Harries-Rees, the piece asks: what happens when two sets of parents meet up to deal with the unruly behaviour of their children?

Will it be a calm and rational debate between grown-ups about the need to teach kids how to behave properly? Or will it be a hysterical night of name-calling, tantrums and tears before bedtime? You can probably guess.

Playing the dad in one of the two couples is Jamie Potts: “We meet the parents of youngish families and they're all professional people who work very, very hard to preserve their professionalism while dealing with quite a small spat. The sons have had an altercation in the park and one has hit the other in the face chipping a tooth, and the parents meet and are desperate to fix everything amicably and to preserve their compassion and warmth... but the mask slips! It has to! It would be a fairly boring play if it didn't, and the pleasure is that as the mask slips you see them scrabbling so hard to get it back, not just for themselves but for the three other people there. But the point is that it slips because they're human, and our flaws are far more interesting than the things that elevate us. They are so desperate to keep the mask on but the elastic is definitely fraying!

“It's a shortish play. It happens over 45 to 50 minutes, and from beginning to end it's just a single take, and without very much prompting from the outside you go through all the imaginable emotions and all their struggles.

“I am playing Alan and he is unpleasant, wonderfully so. He is a lawyer, quite a high-price in-demand lawyer and he takes his job very, very seriously, so much so that all the other life goals like family and humanity take a back seat. As long as he is on his pedestal, as long as he is winning court battles, then he is fine. But life gets in the way. He carries on working until his phone is taken away from him and then we see a very different side to him. It is a nice fun part to play, wonderfully unpleasant to his wife and to his children and to the strangers that he has just met.”

Acting is one of the great pleasures in Jamie's life: “I suppose it is ego! I used to work as an actor when I was a young person, early teens. I did the agent thing and had some professional work and then I had to do what a lot of actors have to face up to and got a normal job. I'm a primary school teacher at the moment and I've had a family. But acting is something I still love, one of the two great life pleasures outside my family. The other one is that I used to be a professional wrestler which is basically theatre as well. Once upon a time I could end up on my head time and again without batting an eyelid but now the eyelid bats so I don't do it so much. I watch it and I love it and I would love to do it more but the wear and tear of wrestling has caught up with me!”