The complexities of male friendship go under the magnifying glass – literally – in Renaissance Men, a new show written by James Patrick and Bag of Beard. The play made its debut this week with a two-date first sharing, which proved more than enough to whet the appetite for a planned tour in 2019.

A riotous comedy with an unexpectedly dark twist, the play centres around three friends – Irvine (Sam Heron), Quentin (Alexander Knott) and Winston (James Demaine) – who think they’ve discovered a priceless original painting in a charity shop in Streatham. Excited by the prospect of striking it rich, the three call in slightly shady local art dealer Mr Sutcliffe (Jack Gogarty) to confirm the painting’s authenticity – but his visit ends up bringing answers of a very different kind when a shocking secret is revealed.

You might be tempted to assume, given their artistic background and love of a good philosophical debate (the company have deliberately steered away from the stereotypical image of the millennial generation), that these three friends would be more than capable of expressing how they feel about things. You might think that – but you’d be wrong. Behind the laugh-a-minute banter and quick-fire insults that characterise their friendship, and which are delivered with delightful authenticity by the cast, there are a whole heap of deep and unspoken emotions. This is particularly true for Sam Heron’s painfully vulnerable Irvine, whose recent interest in writing erotic poetry increasingly seems to be an attempt to get something very serious off his chest – if only his mates weren’t too distracted by their own dramas to pay attention.

It might be early days for the play, but Ryan Hutton’s production is already highly polished. All four characters are expertly drawn and totally convincing both in writing and performance; the four actors work very naturally together, and even in the play’s relatively short running time of 70 minutes, there’s a complexity and detail to each character that leaves us wanting to know more. Dysfunctional and eccentric they may be, but a few moments of genuine affection do manage to slip through the barriers the characters have constructed around themselves, making it obvious their problem isn’t that they don’t care about each other, but that they just don’t know how to say so.

The pace of the drama also feels just right, with the very funny first half of the play carefully laying clues to what’s coming, so that while it comes as a surprise, on reflection what happens next actually makes perfect sense. And there’s a growing suspense – heightened by the fact that we never get to see the painting ourselves – as we wait to find out if the three friends really are on to a winner.

Topical, original and very funny, Renaissance Men is off to a great start, with two sell-out performances already under its belt and no doubt many more to come. What begins as a simple story about three friends who like to wind each other up is quickly revealed to have hidden depths, and touches on some important issues – but while the play certainly enters some pretty dark territory, it never fails to be great entertainment. This is a really promising new production; let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long for the next chance to see it.

Renaissance Men was performed at the Old Red Lion Theatre on 25th and 26th November. For details of future shows, visit bagofbeard.co.uk or follow @BagOfBeard.