[In the following review, Morley notes the realism of the characters and setting of The Sisters Rosensweig but criticizes the play's lack of dramatic action and the predictability of its conclusion.]

Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig is that rarity, a new play still on Broadway after more than two years. It is also now at Greenwich in a new production by Michael Blakemore with an all-local cast who point up the failings of the drama while celebrating its commercial viability.

This is Chekhov for the matinée matrons: three sisters, all American, forgather in London to celebrate a family birthday and check on each other's professional, marital, medical and sexual fortunes. There's the responsible one who's gone into banking (Janet Suzman), the daffy one who has become a minor radio agony aunt (Maureen Lipman) and the ambitious one who had to foresake reporting for travel journalism when the troubles got too close (Lynda Bellingham). All are delineated with all the care of a writer who has been to dramatist's classes and knows just when simply to tug the heartstrings and when to start tying them in little knots.

The whole sorority have secret agonies. One of them is twice divorced, another has a husband who has forsaken her for Raymond Chandler fantasies, and the third falls in love with gays, or at least with one curiously obnoxious gay British stage director.

It is not that Wasserstein's characters are unreal, or that her London setting is in any way implausible: if anything, we have too much here of the real thing. Conversations which can be heard over most up-market West London dinner parties are pursued to their relentlessly banal conclusions; every time the doorbell rings you hope somebody more interesting will drop by, and each time someone still less interesting does.

It is true this is a conversation piece, and I was not expecting a body to tumble out of the sofa. But a play two hours long needs to be about something. I have a terrible feeling that what we are meant to be watching is the sisters bonding; but watching people bond is like watching the paint dry: it takes a while, and at the end what has happened is what you always thought would happen.