As Guare himself has pointed out, nowadays a couple of quick Google or Facebook clicks would have unmasked the imposture. The Kittredges schlep along to a downtown bookstore to buy Poitier's autobiography, wherein they read that he has only daughters no son. It's not just the references to apartheid and Cats: with its backdrop of a New York ravaged by Aids, drugs and crime, a crazily inflated art market, and an era whose style was set by Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko and Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe, Six Degrees of Separation is very much of its time (though the couple's precarious finances, their house-of-cards lifestyle, has a recognisably modern ring to it as well). The director, David Grindley, has decided against updating the setting, which would in any case have been tricky. What seems at first, in the long introductory scene, to be shaping up as a four-character chamber piece spirals out into a chaotic tragi-comic farce with 18 speaking parts. In the shifting-sand dramatic structure, characters step forward to confide in the audience, remembering dreams or events that are then re-enacted in short, sharp flashbacks. Instead, it's the springboard for a densely packed rumination on art as commerce, celebrity culture, the unbridgeable generation gap, racial politics, bourgeois delusion, the very American Gatsby-like flair for self-reinvention and much more besides, all played out in a curved womb-like arena of pulsating crimson, like a CinemaScope Rothko. The scam is very far from being the play's main point, though. Delighted, the Kittredges, with a thrill of radical chic, insist their new friend stay the night: such a nice young man, and black too, how exotic! But then Paul just has to go and spoil it all by bringing (full frontal nudity alert here) a rent boy into his bed.
(He is played by Obi Abili, pictured right: credit, Manuel Harlan).
It looks like the evening is headed for disaster but Paul, as it turns out, saves the occasion, rustling up a gourmet scratch supper from the ancient leftovers lurking in the fridge, discoursing passionately on J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, dazzling his hosts with the prospect of bit parts in his father's forthcoming movie musical and eventually wheedling those two million bucks out of the South African's pocketbook. Suddenly a young man, Paul, arrives at their door, desperate and bleeding: a college friend of their children's (so he says), he has just been mugged and didn't know whom else to turn to. Art dealers, they must inveigle a visiting South African into bankrolling the purchase of a Cézanne that they will own for an intoxicating few days before flogging it off at a fat profit. This is how it starts: in a swanky Upper East Side apartment, a middle-aged married couple, Ouisa and Flan Kittredge, are walking on eggshells. How does Six Degrees of Separation, in this suave, fast-moving revival, stack up two decades down the line? Since then, though, the planet has changed beyond recognition. The second was the theory, developed by various writers and social psychologists and vastly popularised by Guare, that "everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people".