While not quite so often revived as Yasmina Reza’s huge international hit Art, her later success Life x 3 is still to be seen with a pleasing frequency. Both plays continue to impress with their cleverness and wit, much of which derives from the work of their English translator Christopher Hampton. Both deal, in part, with similar subject matter, in an unsparing analysis of friendship, and the ambitions and intrigues that might threaten it. And both are fairly short, at significantly under two hours.

The Watermill’s good-looking, well-acted revival of Life x 3, directed by Sarah Esdaile, reinforces my belief that this is a first-class play. I still have reservations, though, about what exactly it’s driving at. If it has ‘a meaning’, then I am not sure what it is.

Essentially, the play is a set of theatrical variations, with four characters playing the same scene (sort of) three times over. The setting (designer Francis O’Connor) is the Paris flat of laid-back astrophysicist Henri (James Wallace) and his sharp-witted businesswoman wife Sonia (Sarah Ball).

Amusing exchanges fill the first few minutes as doting dad Henri tries to bring bedtime happiness to offstage offspring Arno, six, evidently a spoilt brat in the making, or already made. Can the boy have a chocolate finger? Certainly not, rules mum. A slice of apple, then? After much bawling from Arno and many explosions from his parents, all seems to be calm.

Then the doorbell rings. It is smoothly superior astrophysicist Hubert (Christopher Villiers) – a mentor and hero to Henri – and his upper-crust wife Inès (Sara Crowe). They bear two bottles of Sancerre (not, one suspects, destined to be Inès’s first drinks of the day). They have come to dinner – a day early. In none of the three versions of the play do we witness the doorstep encounter. Clearly Ms Reza realised it would have been hard to avoid one of the two easy solutions to the problem – either ‘Let’s call the whole thing off’ or ‘Shall we get a takeaway?’.

Instead, we cut each time to the scene post-‘dinner’, with Hubert polishing off the last Wotsits and chocolate fingers (a type of biscuit he has, oddly, never previously eaten) – clearly the sole constituents of the meal. In between nibbles, he has a bombshell revelation for Henri, who after three years of potentially damaging academic silence is about to publish a paper on the flatness, or otherwise, of dark-matter haloes around galaxies. It appears that another team may have pipped him to the post and that as a consequence, as Hubert rashly expresses it to Inès in the hearing of Sonia, Henri is “doomed”. (One suspects that Mr Hampton is not a fan of Dad’s Army and therefore unaware of the comic potential of this word.) How Henri takes the news – first with raving fury, later remarkably stoically – and how it impacts on the progress of the party are sources of interest and enlightenment to the audience. So, too, are the subtleties and confusions of the characters’ amorous and professional relationships Aprogramme note suggests that the play questions “the way we view our own reality”. For me, though, as I sat through it again, I had the uncomfortable feeling during the repeated scenes that I wasn’t watching the same quartet each time but four very different people. Could it be, perhaps, that what Ms Reza is trying to convey is that far from being fully formed and unchangeable, a person’s ‘character’ is merely what she or he chooses to present to suit the circumstances of the moment?

At the Watermill Theatre, at Bagnor, near Newbury, until February 28. Box office: 01635 46044 (www.watermill.org.uk).