Just as Amy Herzog’s Belleville has come to Europe, so have its two central characters, Zack (James Norton) and Abby (Imogen Poots). These young newlyweds have settled in Belleville, one of the most ethnically diverse areas of Paris, where they rent rooms from Senegalese Alioune (Malachi Kirby) and his wife Amina (Faith Alabi).
Zack is so devoted to Abby that he has apparently abandoned his medical prospects in the States and taken up a post with Doctors Without Borders, because of her expressed desire to live in Paris.
She later insists that she had only wanted to come for a weekend. It is soon clear that their marriage is in trouble.
Abby, who has suffered from depression and anxiety attacks since the death of her mother, has stopped taking her medication.
She babbles insensitively to Alioune about Islam, gets horribly drunk, and self-harms.
Zack smokes too much cannabis, watches porn on his computer, lies about crucial elements of his life and is suspected (on little ostensible evidence) of a great capacity for violence by his wife and landlords.
The violence comes, albeit not in the way we expect, in time to form the climax to this deeply unsatisfactory play.
Belleville seems like a segment of an American TV series in which two minor characters are dispatched to Europe to add some geographical glamour.
There is neither absorbing drama, arresting ideas nor leavening humour.
The characterisation is so shallow that we never understand why the couple came or stay together, let alone why we should care. It is greatly to the credit of Norton and Poots that we remain at all engaged through the 100-minute unbroken action.
He exudes sincerity (even when lying) and brings his trademark baffled decency to the role. She has an effusive energy that lightens the many opaque moments of the play.
Unlike Belleville, Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance has ideas to spare, although few of them are intriguing, let alone meaningful.
This 1909 play about the proposed marriage between the ‘overbred’ Bentley Summerhays and the tradesman’s daughter, Hypatia Tarleton, is Shaw at his most facetious.
His characters are either cardboard caricatures or Aunt Sallies, there simply to be knocked down. Halfway through Act One, there is a hint of drama when a plane crashes (offstage), discharging the aviator (Luke Thallon) and his Polish passenger (Lara Rossi).
They bring a welcome burst of vitality into the sterile proceedings, but they too are swiftly submerged in the unholy mixture of nursery chatter and cod philosophy.
Director Paul Miller has had deserved success with previous Shavian revivals of The Philanderer and Widowers’ Houses, but Misalliance is a misfire.
When Hypatia (Marli Siu) declared that “Three or four times in the past half-hour, I’ve been on the verge of screaming,” I had to concur.
Onwards and upward in the New Year!
BELLEVILLE, Donmar, London WC2 (Tickets: 020 3282 3808/donmarwarehouse.com; £10-40)
MISALLIANCE, Orange Tree, Richmond (Tickets: 020 8940 3633/orangetreetheatre.co.uk; £10-25)