The People are Friendly, Royal Court Downstairs, London

Home truths

Donna peers dubiously at the plate of stuffed vine leaves and promptly speaks her mind. "They look like they've just slipped out of someone's arse," she observes. Her scepticism is not confined to the posh nibbles at this homecoming do for her upwardly mobile elder sister. Michelle – the central character in Michael Wynne's highly entertaining new play – has stunned her family by replanting herself in Birkenhead after 12 years of pursuing a project-management career in London.

With her middle-class boyfriend in tow, she has purchased a large five-bedroomed house overlooking the estate where she grew up and the disused shipyards. She claims she wants to be part of the community and to see the turnaround in Birkenhead. Folk are friendlier up here, too, she insists. They call you "love" when they give you your change. Michelle Butterly's wonderfully deflating Donna looks unconvinced that all this is a sufficient explanation for her sibling's surprise return to her roots.

From Aeschylus to Pinter, homecomings in drama mean trouble. There's no exemption from this rule for Michelle, beautifully acted here by Sally Rogers, who shows you both the proselytising self-improver and the rather lonely misfit for whom assertive success has been a kind of consolation prize. Wynne's play could have been po-faced and preachy, given its political import and central irony. Michelle discovers that her father is clinging to false hopes of re-employment in a revived shipyard. In fact, she knows just how deluded those expectations are.

The daughter who made good is, rather predictably, the baddie on this front – a tool of the service industries that are creating divisive pockets of affluence. As Donna says of Liverpool and its very partial regeneration, "One square mile of wealth doesn't do anything for the surrounding 20 miles".

But one of the joys of the piece is how little it relies on editorialising speeches. No character has a monopoly of wisdom in a play whose astute social commentary emerges through the rough and tumble of a grimly uproarious family party, expertly orchestrated here in Dominic Cooke's first-rate production. At times, Wynne's writing, with its ear for Liverpudlian backchat, suggests a heterosexual Jonathan Harvey or a more radical Willy Russell. What is impressive is the resilient breeziness with which he depicts the appalling, everyday bizarreries of contemporary life.

The People Are Friendly presents a world where Michelle's niece Kirsty (Sheridan Smith), a 16-year-old single mother, is prepared to engage in drug-dealing if it means that one day she'll be able to afford breast implants. Her mind is so addled by our fame-obsessed culture, she declares that she wouldn't even mind having a stalker. Donna, who fancies herself as a psychic, may arouse mirth with her diagnosis of why the pets in the locality have been dying in droves. It's tragic, though, that she can't see that the supposed poltergeist is closer to home in the disturbing shape of her little boy, who has retreated into eating disorders, mutism and a private form of self-expression not modelled on the career of St Francis of Assisi.

Unlike Neil LaBute, in The Distance From Here, Wynne does not present his characters as anthropological specimens for the scandalised gratification of educated punters. Indeed, it's a nice touch that the middle-class boyfriend (Stephen Mangan) is shown to be as useless and untrustworthy as Donna's feckless scally layabout of a spouse. Warmly recommended.

To 6 July 020-7565 5100/5000