I picked this one up having seen Rory Kinnear in the Hollow Crown adaptation of Richard II and subsequently finding out he'd written a play himself. It's a heartbreaking story pretty much from the outset - as the blurb says, it's about "a family falling apart" with the action taking place around the plans for a birthday party for a severely disabled son we never see onstage.
In terms of writing style there's one thing that stands out as unusual to me, which is the directions written in for lines to be spoken over or interrupting another. These are a little hard to follow while reading but I can certainly see how they'd work rather powerfully on stage (and perhaps more so on screen, where the focus can be more easily directed) to raise the feeling of chaos and friction between the characters. There are a lot of deep emotional scars and history between them, and the text tells enough of the story to find something to relate to in everyone, including the apparent "bad guy", the estranged father. And without giving too much away, the ending feels sort of painfully inevitable from the outset, in the grand tradition of tragedy.
I think it would be fair to say I look forward to more, of the modern plays I've read so far this was one of the best. No written dialect, coherant and devastating storyline, deep characters and an easy super-modern update to a very traditional style of storytelling.
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