Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure, recently remade for Hollywood as Downhill, starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, might be called a near-disaster movie. A young family of four spend some rare “quality time” together on a short skiing holiday in the French Alps, but barely have they got their bearings before an al fresco lunch turns into a double-helping of panic.

A booming controlled explosion sends an avalanche terrifyingly hurtling towards the diners, threatening to engulf them. When the snow-dust settles, it emerges that the father is nowhere to be seen. He returns, acting as if nothing has happened, shrugging off his unmanly retreat, laughing at the close-shave, and thereby tipping the family into an abyss of estrangement and antagonism.

Donmar artistic director Michael Longhurst initially programmed Tim Price’s stage adaptation of Force Majeure before the pandemic struck. The theatre’s 2020 reopening production – Blindness, an adapted novel, also a film, about a plague of sightlessness – felt like a smart fit for the Covid era. So does this.

Thanks to red-lists, variant scares and trashed finances, few of us will have had (or perhaps even contemplated) an Alpine escape of late, but the jittery fall-out from a traumatic episode, fault-lines and failings revealed under pressure? That stuff may feel very close to home. The show is billed as a dark comedy – there are bleak laughs to be had along the way, but they’re apt to include a wincing recognition.

Tonally, though the husband and wife are still called Tomas and Ebba, and the children Harry and Vera too, as in the film, Longhurst’s production makes things sound more South London than Scandinavian. There’s a notable British uptightness at work. Largely cleaving to the original script, but supplying more nervous garrulousness where on screen there are icy conversational voids, Price astutely emphasises how frayed things already are before the incident.