Donmar Warehouse | ★★★✩✩

Tim Price’s adaptation of Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s movie has all the makings of a searing exploration of First World, middle class problems.
Ebba and Thomas (Lyndsey Marshal and Rory Kinnear) are on a skiing holiday with their children, teenager Vera and her younger brother Harry (on this night Florence and Henry Hunt).
They have a week to detach themselves from phone and tablet screens and also the cycle of bickering that is their daily normal.
In director Michael Longhurst’s ambitious staging the action takes place on a (artificially) snowy slope with the majesty of the mountains serving as a backdrop (design Jon Bausor). This is possibly the first show with on-stage skiing. Young, chic people in brightly coloured piste garb enter from one side of the steeply racked stage and then slide diagonally across the stage.
Meanwhile Tomas and Ebba attempt relaxation as Ebba deeply resents her husband’s inability to peel himself away from his phone. Controlled avalanches are triggered by explosive charges. They stop uncontrolled bigger avalanches, mansplains Tomas. Then one awe-inspiring snowy surge heads straight for the family at an open air mountain restaurant. Everyone responds instinctively. Ebba dives over her children, customers scatter, and Tomas? Well, he picks up his phone and scarpers.
The already fraying relationship begins to unravel with this loss of trust. Kinnear delivers a terrific portrait of male inadequacy. For Ebba it is not only that Tomas’s instinct was to save himself and not his family that is so destructive,it is his cowardice in admitting that he ran away.
The fallout is embarrassingly played out in front of hotel guests, plus Tomas’s friend Mats (Suli Rumi) and his young girlfriend Jenny (Siena Kelly). But the play is more a comedy of manners than the excavation of hidden character that it promises to be. The scene in which Mats and Jenny tussle, during a sleepless night, over how they would have behaved in Ebba and Tomas’s situation is a light and irrelevant comedy interlude