Eldridge has lost none of his ability to steer dialogue from raw intensity to the belly flops of bathos.  In fact, this talent has intensified and become multifoliate as this quartet has developed its own centripetal momentum, as the waltzer at a fairground.

The voice I hear behind it all is that of Philip Larkin.  Perhaps I can try to demonstrate the difference between Maggie and Gary by suggesting a Larkin poem that would get a belly laugh from Gary and one that would appeal to the upwardly mobile tastes of Maggie.

First off Administration (which Larkin wrote in 1965)

That would get a filthy, fruity guffaw from Gary.

An Arundel Tomb (from Larkin’s 1965 volume The Whitsun Weddings) would appeal to Maggie.

You will remember that this poem involves Larkin noticing that in the pre-baroque effigy of the married earl and countess “One sees, with a sharp shock/His hand withdrawn, holding her hand”.  The poem gradually mounts to into magnificent peroration – 

“Time has transfigured them into/Untruth.  The stone fidelity/They hardly meant has come to be/Their final blazon, and to prove/Our almost-instinct almost true/What will survive of us is love”.

I thought I was up to speed with the tropes and trips of Eldridge’s imagination and the dips and dives of his sense of humour.  But I have to confess that I was knocked for six and moved to tears by Middle.  The production reunites the supple subtle team who did such a magnificent job on Beginning – director Polly Findlay, supreme master of pacing, with set by Fly Davis and lighting design by Rick Fisher.

I also have to say that piece of sheer writing that I most admire in this play are the speeches were Maggie gets to explain herself. 

There is some wonderful clowning where the couple recall the sexy sex they used to have before IVF, endometriosis, and daddy’s working himself to an early grave so they can pay the fees on private schooling for their little princess. This left Maggie feeling ashamed of feeling ungrateful and guilty that she wanted more than to be a 24/7 mum. 

Gary has accidentally chanced on private feed and noticed the incidence of wank-worthy stuff about men with truncheon-sized penises and stuff.  Wanting to reignite their sex-life, it is typical of Gary, and a sign of why she will never get him out of him out of her system,  that he overcame the instincts of a lifetime, and writhed into the Romford branch of Ann Summers to buy her a proud vibrator.  And it is a mark of Eldridge’s bang-on instinct for comedy that the man she thinks she has fallen in love with is a policeman (but they had phased out truncheons by the time John joined the force…) and that he is so right-on and solicitous of the feelings of his current wife that he surmises it is too early to think of having full adulterous with Maggie.