Where the Morally Repugnant Elite Meet to Bleat

The Telegraph bills a new play it reviewed this weekend as a “skewering of the liberal rich” but like so many things in Britain, the title is a polite mask to what is often itself concealing what the chatter-ati, the “provision wing of Radio 4” do in the open: live on a hateful envy of one thing or another.

Clay and Kelly live in a luxurious home with their cute young daughter and their new baby son. Kelly has a well-paid office job, so Clay has become a doting house-husband, and this apparently enviable couple have invited the rest of the family for Thanksgiving.

Everything goes gloriously wrong. It's clear that Clay can't abide his cynical plastic surgeon of a brother, Cash, and the golden couple also look down on Cash's glamour puss of an East European girlfriend who has alarmingly non-PC views on everything from gipsies (kill them) to smoking (best done in front of the kiddies).

But here’s the twist. This is why it’s okay to detest con Panto these “elite” libs:

The play is American, which will give English viewers a chance to say: "Well, of course, we are nothing like as bad as that."

Wanna bet? Whose behaviour do these “we are all Tibetan” types affect when they feel so damn earthier than though? That’s right: Europeans, particularly those of the English southeast sub-species – the one of their imagination.

I hope you already ate, because it gets worse. Our “man of the people” director is himself doing this for more than just publicity, it has an ugly tint of the same complex of sneering condescension and attention-seeking behaviour to those who would are just as boxed in and objectified to being looked down on as the stage characters: the audience.

When Dominic Cooke took over as artistic director of the Royal Court this year, he promised to reflect the theatre's predominantly middle-class audience back to itself. For a venue best known for gritty, in-your-face, kitchen-sink drama, this was a revolutionary manifesto.

Or is it an S & M thing, some sort of constitutional vestige of Elizabethan Equusian winky-winky for the very, very special, wisdom dispensing lefty pestilence that keeps scratching around for a new “fabulous” cause?

In fact it almost seems like the reason they want so much to be like you and me, is because they can’t really stand themselves.