It may soon end up as a supermarket, a block of trendy offices or a set of loft apartments, but tonight – for the quartet of characters sliding into early middle age in Mick Mahoney’s new play – the “up for sale” Sacred Heart Church Hall in NW3 is still the repository of a stack of glowing, if uneasy memories of a misspent youth clubbing there at weekends. The scenario in this drama is so classically familiar, it almost comes clamped within its own iconic quote marks: local boy made – pretty dodgily- good returns to home territory in order to stir latent lusts and rip the scab off some old wounds, while handily allowing the dramatist to call into question the meaning of success and failure, fraudulence and authenticity and the shaky, unexamined basis of most of our lives.

It’s the sharp, accurate detail and truthfully tangled relationships within that broad framework that enable Mahoney’s funny and perceptive play to swerve, by and large, from too rutted a course and to involve you in the characters’ intricately shared past. The last in a satisfying series of co-production between the Royal Court and the National Theatre Studio, the piece is played in an unbroken 90 minutes of “real time”, with the audience arranged in an L shape around an authentic-looking set. Three friends are decorating the old haunt for a child’s party when, all sexily untrustworthy charisma in a Gucci suit, Michael French’s Jerry swans in. It’s the first time Evan Stewart’s Patrick, as worn down and faded as Jerry is cosmetically sleek, has seen his former best mate since Jerry, tired of Patrick’s dithering, reneged on a projected partnership 20 – odd yearsback. For one, property development and wealth; for the other, small-fry building jobs, worthy work with a boys’ football club, and a family.

Almost every potential cliche in the play has a twist that redeems it, and Edward Hall’s production elicits beautifully shaded performances, particularly from Mr French as he skillfully signals, from underneath the wide-boy swagger, a rather lost soul who has seen through success and will spend the rest of his life pining for an irrecoverable youth. Flickering between iconic amusement, social embarrassment and sudden accesses of keen pain, Doon Mackichan also gives a splendidly natural performance as Patrick’s wife Kate who, inevitably, harbours unresolved longings for Jerry.