Benefactors, Albery Theatre, London

In the realm of the tenses

The multi-talented, multi-tasking Jeremy Sams popped his director's hat on recently and joined forces with Michael Frayn for a joyous revival of Noises Off that has been a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Their partnership continues now with a sharp, fluent revival of Frayn's 1984 play, Benefactors, a piece that, for all its comic lines and situations, is as underlyingly bleak as Noises Off is high-spirited.

With a systematic purposefulness, this work exposes the weaknesses in liberal idealism, and the ambiguities of benevolence. It focuses on two married couples whose fates over the years become increasingly intertwined. In 1968, David, an architect, is commissioned to redevelop Basuto Road, a rundown Victorian residential area in London SE15. At first, he opposes the idea of high-rise building on human grounds, but, faced with mounting difficulties due to site restrictions, he relinquishes his vision of a world of collegiate dwellings for the very skyscrapers he had once in principle resisted.

His wife Jane (Sylvestra Le Touzel), a hyper-efficient superwoman, gets roped into the project as a market researcher-cum-social worker. Painful complications arise because David and Jane are constitutionally inclined to treat their unhappily married neighbours – Colin, the undergraduate star who has dwindled into a resentful hack, and Sheila, his downtrodden wife – as though they, too, were a site in need of rehabilitation. It's not just Ibsen's The Master Builder that Benefactors echoes: you are also reminded of Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck as you watch the successful couple's do-gooding catastrophically backfire. Indeed, it is their well-intentioned but short-sighted recruitment of Sheila as David's secretary that precipitates the crisis.

Aden Gillett is splendid as the architect, exuding the irritating sanguine eagerness of the kind of tunnel-visioned visionary who fails to spot the obvious: that Sheila (played by the excellent Emma Chambers as a touching study in parasitic helplessness) is besotted with him. David is the type of liberal who underestimates man's capacity for destructive hatred. He continues to be ludicrously obliging to Neil Pearson's baleful malcontent of a Colin, even when it is abundantly clear that his erstwhile friend is intent on acting his nemesis.

Like a good deal of Frayn's work, Benefactors trains a clear, sceptical eye on the human cost of attempting to impose order on an unruly universe. The irony, though, is that this play about planning pays a high price itself for the excessively patterned and predictable way in which it has been organised. At times, it feels less like a drama than a mechanism for generating pointed reversals. The proceedings are cast in retrospective mode, and this production – which surrounds the action with brutalist concrete walls peculiarly reminiscent of the National Theatre – manages the constant transitions between direct-to-audience address and re-enactment with a fluid grace. There is poignancy in this to-and-fro motion from a world of naive optimism and promise to the cynical realism of Eighties society, where even Jane has come to the conclusion that people want to be told what to do. The drawback of a format where so much is stated rather than shown is that it increases the sense that the dramatis personae exist to illustrate a predetermined thesis and are denied those inconsistencies and opacities that truly living stage-characters evince.

The audience latches enthusiastically on to every available funny line, willing the piece to be the jolly laugh it isn't. What stays with you is its blackness, memorably incarnated and voiced by Colin: "You look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe."