It’s always a gamble the guest list for an intimate dinner at home.

Anything could throw plans awry. Your old friend from college you have not seen for 15 years has developed serious instability tendencies and an unhealthy interest in your kitchen knives.

The young widow marking the anniversary of her husband’s suicide didn’t bother to mention she’s vegetarian again, a detail that could prove fatal to the main course, and the starter.

Safe with your younger sister, surely? But was it you who forgot she was bringing the fiancé you didn’t even know about, who just happens to be three times her age?

Chuck in a smattering of alcoholism, drug abuse, political extremism and the small matter of adultery and the recipe for a successful soiree just went out of the basement window of your trendy Muswell Hill flat.

But while the protagonists in this sharp, darkly funny production of Torben Betts’s Muswell Hill may be enduring the dinner party from their nightmares the first night audience were spellbound, roaring their approval at final curtain.

Co-directed by Hampshire’s Deborah Edgington this is a fabulous London theatre debut for the Chesil Theatre stalwart, who won acclaim for her work on A Streetcar Named Desire in Winchester.

Working with fellow director Roger Mortimer, the founder of Two Sheds Theatre Company, Edgington, who only turned to directing two years ago after a long spell as head of fundraising and development with Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre, has underscored here her rising recognition as a new force in a world that can prove difficult to break into for mature entrants.

Muswell Hill, performed in the round, demands a lot of its cast, performing always just feet, if not inches, from their audience.

The action takes place exclusively in the sparkling kitchen of high-flying accountant Jess (Annabel Bates) and husband would-be writer Mat (Jack Johns).

Around the bread-maker and eye-level oven with its precious monkfish stew, gather unwitting blind date guests Karen (Charlotte Pyke) and Simon (Ralph Aiken), desperately insecure younger sister Annie (Nicole Abraham) and aging flower-print shirt-wearing lothario Tony (Gregory Cox).

Only the small deposits of rubble strewn in corners nod to the backdrop for the evening; an earthquake in far-off Haiti that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands.

As the evening wears on the rubble also comes to represent the cracks and flaws in the lives of all who are present.

Muswell Hill leaves no one untouched by curtain down, their small lives appearing even less significant against the horrors unfolding in the Caribbean.

  • Muswell Hill runs until March 14. Park Theatre is two minutes from Finsbury Park tube station. More information: ParkTheatre.co.uk.