Review The Secondary Victim

 A play dealing with the emotional and professional life of a beleaguered therapist ultimately disappoints Peter Barker.  

The Secondary Victim
by Matthew Campling

Confidentially Speaking
 https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The vulnerability of a professional therapist whose work with clients takes place behind closed doors takes centre stage in Matthew Campling's drama The Secondary Victim.

A woman psychotherapist with family problems of her own is accused by a client of inappropriate sexual behaviour towards him.

There is a lot of potential for an intriguing and credible story when both denial and charges of abuse depend on on one person's word against another.

With his own experience of disproven professional misconduct accusations, Campling could have written a fascinating insight into a normally hidden world.

The playwright's own varied career has also included a psychotherapy practice, work as a magazine agony uncle and a spell as an expert on chat shows.

Nevertheless, while the first half of this play lasting over two and a half hours, has absorbing moments, overall The Secondary Victim  is marred by a dramatically unsatisfying and implausible structure.

Despite this, director Matthew Gould has gathered together an impressive cast including Susannah Doye who gives a careful and precise performance as psychotherapist Ali.

After the complaints of the troubled patient, Hugo, played by Michael Hanratty, she is accused of  misconduct and brought before her professional association's disciplinary tribunal. 

However many of the situations forced upon the actors feel far-fetched and contrived, with the writer trying to shoehorn several of different plots into one.

Gary Webster as husband Victor makes valiant efforts as her husband  with a passionate portrayal of a loving spouse unhappy at sharing his wife with her professional duties as a therapist.

However the root of failed businessman Victor's jealousy and its exposition by Campling lacks credibility.

There are another couple of plots involving a patient Teddy - Christopher Laishley - facing criminal charges and the personal relationship of Ali's own therapist with another therapist. 

The latter has some comedy but the script feels unreal. The play becomes muddled and overlong  with  longeurs and often a lack of substance and depth. Doyle as Ali is allowed to give the best performance but director Matthew Gould seems to struggle with the clunky writing.

The subject matter has potential but the work feels very much like a play in development rather than a finished piece and The Secondary Victim garners a red light.

Review The Retreat

An acclaimed TV comedy writer's first play has plenty of gags but is kept afloat by a fine cast and director, says Peter Barker.

The Retreat
by Sam Bain

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding?
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Luke is burnt out by his life in London as an investment broker. There’s too much cocaine and too many hookers.

So after meeting Tara, a Buddhist, he grasps the opportunity to go to a spiritual retreat in the wilds of Scotland. 

But the arrival of his ne'er-do-well brother Tony destroys any chance of peace, calm and enlightenment.

The Retreat is Sam Bain’s first play, but he is already well-known as a TV writer - as co-creator of Peep Show, the movie The Four Lions and the recent sitcom Fresh Meat.

In this stage debut, his skill as a comedy writer is evident with a muscular use of language to produce laugh-out-loud moments. 

Bain may deliver laughs from an original and quirky viewpoint, but the play's plot and story nevertheless lacks any real point, punch or character development.

About the only serious points it makes are that cults are bollocks, the slings and arrows of life are unavoidable, and family is important. These are not original thoughts, but at least Bain makes them funny.

A former actor in Dr Who Samuel Anderson, as the Buddhist monk wannabe Luke, gives an assured straightman performance, while Adam Deacon proves himself to be be a definite comic talent as streetwise but inept brother Tony.

Yasmine Akram as Tara has a tougher challenge with an even more thinly written part  and it is to her credit that she makes something substantial out of the slightest of the three roles.

The set by Paul Wills depicts a stone hut in the present day Scottish Highlands and is an impressive facsimile of the real thing.

Kathy Burke, as you might expect from an experienced director and comedy actor, directs a slick production that delivers the gag-to-gag laughs and makes the 90-minute running time seem a great deal shorter, earning the play an  amber light.

Review Fishskin Trousers

A beguiling tale, drawing on folk myth and 20th century history, alternately intrigues and frustrates reviewer Peter Barker.  

Fishskin Trousers
by Elizabeth Kuti

Catching The Waves
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Fishskin Trousers weaves together a trio of monologues from three characters spanning hundreds of years .

Mab (Jessica Carroll) is a medieval serving woman in a castle on the East Anglian coast who develops a fascination for a wild supernatural creature which the local fishermen trap in their nets.

Ben (Brett Brown) is a 1970s' Australian scientist, haunted by his past, working to combat the Soviet threat during  the Cold War. Yet he begins to wonder whether there is a supernatural reason for the strange noises interfering with a radar system.

Hauling the play into the net of our times,  Mog (Eva Traynor) is a teacher from the current century who finds herself having to make a tough decision after a love affair ends unhappily. Yet her tale also unwittingly echoes and is inextricably linked with the past.   

Their voices all emerge from the same location - the real-life Sussex fishing village of Orford and mysterious island of Orford Ness. 

Each character from a different era era shares his or her experience with the audience, psychologically and physically separate from each other, yet intertwined.

Fishskin Trousers weaves together myth, psychology and history to give a sense of the uncanny combined with earthy personal dilemmas. However the dependence on storytelling alone proves a double edged sword.    

This production, a revival of the play's première four years ago when it achieved considerable success with the same director and cast, has an ingenious idea at its heart and poignant moments.

The play seeks to map out the psychic geography of three emotionally lost people's lives, as well as evoking the physical atmosphere swirling around them.

Nevertheless it does feel very static, which also emphasizes the unevenness within the drama, breaking the mystery and the poetic language's spell.

The archaic language with  thick local accent of the servant Mab does rather distract, bordering on parody, although Jessica Carroll's performance is undoubtedly characterful.

There are also strong performances from Brett Brown as researcher Ben and Eva Traynor as tormented schoolteacher Mog. 

The staging is minimal, a boulder enclosed by a circle of shingle with the lone additon of a visual soundwave on the backdrop. The unravelling of the stories do draw the audience in but for me, it felt like a play more suited to radio.

The resolution is neat, ingenious and satisfying with the qualities of a good ghost story. But the monologues sometimes seem unbalanced with, for example, the opening monologue from Mab being very long.

Overall, this felt like a very promising rather than a fully achieved set of monologues and play. It  might also have been interesting to bring in more choreography.

There was much to admire but my interest in the characters waxed and waned like the sound and sea waves and it's an amber light.   

Review What Shadows

A portrait of a politician notorious for his views on race relations provides Francis Beckett with a telling glimpse of 20th century post colonial Britain.

What Shadows
by Chris Hannan

His Country, Right Or Wrong
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

One of the watershed moments in community relations in Britain – perhaps the most important one – was a widely publicised speech by a senior Conservative, the MP for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell, in 1968.

He quoted a constituent as saying: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

He talked of a white woman going to the shops and being followed by “children, charming, wide-eyed, grinning picaninnies.” He said: “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents.”

Chris Hannan’s What Shadows is a serious and thoughtful play about Powell himself, the circumstances in which the speech came to be made, and the effect it had.

To the author’s great credit, he does not take the easy and widely accepted route, in which Powell is at worst a monster, at best a man cynically or foolishly unleashing monstrous forces, and Powell’s opponents are, universally, defenders of decency.

The play sets out its stall quickly, opening with a scene years after the Powell speech in which a distinguished black academic goes in search of a white colleague whose career she once helped ruin for expressing sympathy with Powell.

Both are performed here with just the right mix of rage and cynicism by, respectively, Amelia Dankor and Joanne Pearce. They agree to team up and try for an interview with the now very elderly politician.

When we meet Powell, he is picnicking with his wife and their old friends Clem and Marjorie Jones. The story of the friendship and the falling out between the Powells and the Joneses is a true one.

Clem Jones was editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star: a warm human being, but a man who in the end put his principles before both his career and his friendships.

Indeed, playwright Chris Hannan acknowledges the help of Clem Jones’s son Nick, a former BBC industrial and political correspondent and a man known, as his father was, for the sort of integrity that sometimes infuriates editors and politicians.

Nicholas Le Prevost and Paula Wilcox are excellent as the Joneses, an entirely believable couple whose fate we care about. Joanne Pearce plays Powell’s wife (combining it with her role as the white academic) and does it well.

However I was not quite as convinced by Ian McDiarmid’s Powell.

He looks right, and in the first act at least he sounds right. And yet, for me, he wasn’t quite right.  Powell had a markedly deliberate manner and an elaborate stillness.

In contrast, McDiarmid has him moving restlessly all the time, sometimes gabbling a bit, sometimes even seeming a little camp.

Roxana Silbert directs with sensitivity and authority, though, occasionally, she has her actors shouting a little too much and the play gets just a little too wordy  towards the end.

However, despite my rather uncomfortable perch on the Park's vertiginous balcony, this proved to be a gripping evening. It's an amber/green light for a finely-crafted, thought-provoking and important play.

Review The Revlon Girl

The Revlon Girl
by Neil Anthony Docking

Making It Up
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

On a rainy day in 1966, one of seven coal waste slag heaps, piled up on a stream above the mining village of Aberfan, slid down the hill, burying, amongst others, the young pupils in the local primary school.

There was a tribunal enquiry and, no doubt, the authorities vowed that lessons would be learned. But below the surface of bureaucratic structures and media hubbub, there are the individual stories of the surviving villagers.

Some of the bereaved mothers formed a support network, meeting regularly at a local hotel and, after a while, organising events to bring some kind of normality back into their lives.

The Revlon Girl is inspired by one such event, the visit of a cosmetics' company representative. Playwright Neil Anthony Docking has turned this into the premise for a play now running at London's Park Theatre.  

Whatever the facts of this visit, The Revlon Girl, while well acted, uneasily mixes real events with fictional scenarios in a piece shaped more like a movie than a stage play.

Four mothers, peaceable Siân (Charlotte Gray),  upwardly mobile Jean (Zoë Harrison), superstitious Marilyn (Michelle McTernan) and wisecracking Rona (Bethan Thomas) are the first to arrive for the talk and demonstration by a doll-like representative (Antonia Kinlay) from American firm Revlon.

As the evening progresses, the veneer cracks and despair and home truths threaten even the solidarity of women whose children have shared the same terrible fate.

Dealing with real life events, especially where those affected are still alive, needs care to strike the correct balance between what really happened and the imaginings of the playwright to bring psychological insight and plausibility.

There are times when authentic voices emerge, an agonized  speech by Rona, dissecting in searing detail the vested interests involved in the tragedy and its aftermath chief amongst these.

Nevertheless, The Revlon Girl is marred on stage by movie tropes and sometimes sitcom-like stereotypes.

This sits awkwardly with far better written more powerful moments which seem out of sync with the rest of the play and make the piece feel cut and pasted together rather than created as an organic story.

It's noticeable that details of the real life visit of the Revlon rep are not outlined in the programme. Nobody is named as being the rep and there are no memories of anybody involved quoted.

This also sat awkwardly for TLT as the play's blurb states it is based on true events. The theatre programme gives only the briefest of details and TLT can find no reference to such a visit outside this play. The details may be true but the lack of solid background in the play does invite questions.

Indeed, TLT's companion wondered why it was a Revlon rep, rather than an Avon representative,  a well known part of 1960s' life bringing American make up glamour to people's homes and allowing women to earn a living.

A look on the internet only found mention of the women's self help group and the hotel meeting. The play itself doesn't set up where the women are meeting and why, apart from an unseen organiser having invited the make up firm rep.

Even allowing for artistic licence, the play appears to invent details to illustrate the supposed psychological state of the women, but some of these inventions feel misjudged.

The title is The Revlon Girl with no mention of Aberfan and it does feel like a true story shoehorned into a harshly stereotypical template. The facts may be correct, but they are introduced rather than explored. 
 
Nevertheless there's good work by a strong cast doing their best with the often clunky dialogue and contrived sequences, making an impact when the writing becomes more compelling with factual and emotional truths emerging. 

The production is nicely styled with costumes from Beryl Thomas and Selectspecs.com and wigs by Claire Pritchard-Jones, giving a visceral sense of the period.

The Revlon Girl is strongly influenced by period works such as Made In Dagenham. However it also sometimes veers away from the Aberfan story in a strange fashion, moving into American made-for-televison movie territory.

Indeed TLT could imagine with only a few tweaks a standard feel good purely fictional film where an American make up  saleswoman drives into a town affected by tragedy, determined to make a difference with an arc going through a gamut of emotions from hostility to eventual mutual understanding.

The play even has a few Americanisms which feel unlikely in a 1960s' Welsh village, the influence of cinema at that time notwithstanding.

Yet there is a hint with another out of sync fantastical sequence at the end that perhaps the shoehorning of a real life tragedy into a movie trope is the point the play is making.

The Revlon rep suddenly in monologue comes out with her own motivation in volunteering to come to Aberfan. The women oddly seem to defer to her individual tragedy, or at least there is a specious implication that tragedies can be compared and equalized.

The direction by Maxine Evans and the lighting of Chris Barrett imply a deliberate fantasy but the moment is thrown away.

It's almost as if the writer and the production have the material but there needs to be different emphases to bring out the juxtapositions and meaning. As it is, this may work better on screen but in this particular stage version, it's another jarring change of tone.

Last year marked 50 years since a generation was scarred and almost wiped out by a preventable tragedy at Aberfan. With the Grenfell Tower alleged health and safety negligence, a history of residents' fears ignored and a costly inquiry underway, it's hard for anyone to see how lessons have ever been learned.

The Revlon Girl, which has toured Wales, is awkwardly put together, has missteps and flaws, but any play leading people to find out about the Aberfan tragedy has a worthwhile quality and it's an amber light.

Review Hamlet

More about kin than kings, Peter Barker is pleasantly surprised by an odd, but intriguing,  fast-moving Hamlet

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

Everything And The Kitchen Sink
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Keep It In The Family could be a tongue-in-cheek alternative title for Hamlet, but the Brandreth family take it literally as the cue for their cut-down version of Shakespeare’s most celebrated play.

It's the tale of Hamlet, a self-examining Danish prince increasingly out of sync with his times after his father’s death and the sudden marriage of his mother to his uncle.

Updated to the modern age, directors Simon Evans and David Aula with script editor Imogen Bond have produced a 90-minute one-act play which has the speed of a TV drama  or movie.

We're in an affluent middle-class kitchen, an attractively detailed set from Polly Sullivan,  with oak cupboards, other pine furniture and a handy set of knives, just in case they're needed.

Benet Brandreth tackles the role of Hamlet, while his wife actress Kosha Engler and his Dad, Gyles, former MP and current media personality, split the rest of the roles.

By day (when he's not doing the matinées!) Benet is an intellectual property lawyer and an expert in rhetoric working with, among others, the RSC.

As might be expected, his delivery is very clear, but it's also a very different kind of interpretation - an unsympathetic, bad-tempered, entitled public schoolboy who, deliberately, often shouts his soliloquys at the audience.

Yet, he is relaxed and witty on first meeting an old university friend. Plus his rendition of "to be or not to be",  first read from a philosophy book and then turned into a debate with himself, worked for me. 

Gyles Brandeth captures Claudius's man-in-power hypocrisy and oily charm, as well as the complacent pomposity of Polonius, notably in the funny and realistic exchange with his son Laertes.

But here a minus kicks in. Having actors double up on the spot left me wondering if this was a dialogue between father and son or father and daughter - with both of Polonius's children acted by the otherwise excellent Kosha Engler.

Despite some entertaining programme notes by Gyles, I did wish I'd brought a Hamlet crib for my companion who came knowing nothing about the play.

We both pondered the script and directorial decisions which left Engler, for instance, doing a confusing immediate switch from garlanded Orphelia to her vengeful brother Laertes - also complete with garland. Similarly the switches between Claudius and Polonius were not always clear.

Nevertheless, there's a certain wit to the staging and a daring knife game which gives an adventurous twist to the fight scenes, sustaining the pace and tension.

Preconceptions about Brandeth senior dismissed, this proved to be an entertaining, if sometimes confusing, evening. The relatively short running time and swiftly moving action kept me hooked.

There's a certain panache to the performances of the trio and, dare I say it, Gyles Brandeth proves his acting chops and I wouldn't mind seeing more of him on the stage.  There are flaws but I still enjoyed this Hamlet enough to award an amber/green light.

Review Loot

Loot 
by Joe Orton

It's An Unfair Cop
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

When TLT was a little nipper, art lessons at primary school were left to our young imaginations.

Inevitably the drawings and paintings often depicted an open window, a burglar in traditional horizontally striped jumper, mask, flat cap and a sack with LOOT stitched on it in large letters.

What he (and it was always a he) did with the loot and whether he subsequently got away with it, we knew and cared not.

Just the deliciousness of a comic book villain unashamedly carrying a bag proclaiming his misdeeds was enough for TLT and her schoolmates. OK, sometimes it said "SWAG" but mostly it was "LOOT".

There is of course something of the same flavour to Joe Orton's 1960s' farce Loot where two rather older nippers have tunnelled from the local undertakers to the vaults of the neighbouring bank but, here, we are faced with possible CONSEQUENCES.

A staple of amateur and professional theatrical companies up and down the nation, Loot is now given an uneven revival at London's Park Theatre directed by Michael Fentiman on the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death.

The two hapless bank robbers (Sam Frenchum as Hal or Harold and Calvin Demba as undertaker's assistant Dennis), unlike TLT's frozen-in-time burglars, have the problem of what to do with the - er - loot.

The play begins in the home of Hal, or rather Hal's father, Mr McLeavy (Ian Redford), a devout Catholic in mourning for Mrs McLeavy, Hal's mother, a stalwart of the WRVS and the Mothers Union. 

A rather over emphatic production starts with the voice of moral crusader Mary Whitehouse. If anything - and we're not sure the play needs such addition -  a news item about The Great Train Robbery would have been more apt.

The boys have stashed the money away in the deceased's coffin - the deceased of course being Hal's mother or "Mum" as a large wreath tells us - while the body ends up in a variety of undignified positions.

Of course there's more to Loot than this. Meanwhile petite feisty blonde Nurse Fay (Sinéad Matthews) is busy seducing the widower, no doubt to add him to her portfolio of ex-husbands - who have also all exited their mortal coils.

Then comes the arrival of Inspector Truscott (Christopher Fulford) of Scotland Yard with the lightest of disguises as an official of the then nationalized Water Board.

This production  proved to be a game of two halves with a much stronger second act.We did feel an abstract towering black, shiny cathedral-like set from Gabriella Slade did the play no favours.

It took a while to orientate ourselves to the fact that we were meant to be in a 1960s' home rather than a funeral parlour or church. However, we were watching from the circle, so it may have seemed more intimate yet surreal from the stalls.

Listening from the circle, there was also some unclear diction in the first act, particularly from Demba and Matthews. Nevertheless this improved 100% in the second act where the cast seemed much more at home with the rhythm of the script and the zingy one-liners finally met their mark.
 
Maybe the household owes something to Galton and Simpson's earlier Steptoe and Son with a son also called Harold and to Billy Liar  and its funeral parlour, as well as Oscar Wilde.

And TLT, having reported on many inquests in her time, knows the treatment of the body (a game Anah Ruddin) is not quite the figment of an outrageous blackly comic imagination as some might think.

What is also interesting about Loot is how, we presume, Orton's criminal conviction as a library book defacer and his experience as a gay man provide a glimpse through the keyhole at the corruption of those in authority in the 1960s before it became headlines many years later: West Midlands and Metropolitan police corruption, council and Catholic Church shenanigans, the Shipman case with the signing of dodgy death certificates.

This provides grist to the mill and heft for sharp black comedy in the fictional situation within the McLeavy household and in the second act a throwaway threat even stretches transatlantically to a political situation across the pond.

Yet  bringing in now more explicit homosexual references takes away some of Loot's artfulness. Secrecy and deceit is intrinsic to the art of a play written because of censorship both in theatre and, to use a BIG word, society.

So there's a rather sluggish first act with a worthier final act. Eventually, this production of Loot just about gets away with it and so we award an amber light. 

Review Rabbits

Rabbits
by Joe Hampson

Strange Stew
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Rabbits puts itself out as a play about what middle-aged people do behind closed doors. Hmm, well, it's  very much a series of sketches with common characters and - eventually - a theme.

However, while an excellent three-strong cast try their best, it's a crab-like would-be comedy of the absurd which doesn't so much develop as try to manoeuvre clumsily sideways.

And there were times when we thought perhaps we were being inducted into the stage equivalent of the cult of mini movies remade with bunnies.

Working in reverse, we learn the rather anticlimactic and curiously old-fashioned whys and wherefores of what turns out to be a sex comedy near the end when it finally pulls the proverbial long-eared mammal out of the hat.

The play revolves around three characters, one apparently a husband and wife, the other a chameleon man who metamorphosizes into three different characters.

When we say metamorphosize, that's a little misleading as it implies fluidity between the three sections of the play.

The dialogue and jerky twists and turns seems to breed more possible plots than a fluffy bunny breeds offspring, going through approximations of numerous TV and movie premises,

So it starts off with a hitman plot where a sitcom-type husband, rather than wanting to get rid of his wife by violent means, is focussing on the disposal of an unwanted gift.

Maybe the baseball cap with a prominent "LA" on the head of the hapless male spouse is a clue. The actors make it characterful but we found the set up and gags distinctly weak and forced.

The experimentation with structure felt less a choice growing organically out of content, but a means of inserting gags and set ups the writer wanted to include. We did also wonder whether this piece may have started off as a radio play.

We noted the repetitions and differences between the first two parts. We can't say there was "Ahhh, brilliant, I never saw that coming" or "Wow, that was wonderfully trailed but it's still a surprise" before the downbeat third act revelation.

Alex Ferns takes on a trio of characters and the first scene is the strongest where visually he cuts a distinctive figure as the hitman in Alex Berry's bedsit set. David Schaal also brings energy to the perculiar ticks and helplessness of the husband.

Karen Ascoe as the spouse who wears the trousers in the household is the stand out in the cast, but this is probably because her transformations as a character are the most extreme.

As far as we could tell, there is also some attempt to make a difference in acting styles between heightened cartoon fantasy with some deliberately coarse acting and more naturalistic scenes.

Staging wise, a raised platform stage or at least more thought given to sightlines for all the rows may have proved beneficial. The space has raked seats on two sides and, about three rows back, we had our view severely impeded when the action descended onto the floor.

Director Sadie Spencer by necessity forces the pace on a script which feels very stitched together and artificial.

Of course at this point it would be easy for the creatives to argue it is meant to be an artificial environment created by the characters themselves and we could dispute about this ad infinitum ... It's that kind of irritating script and situation.

For us this felt like a play that isn't as insightful, experimental or funny as it thinks it is. Still, bunny casting must be hoping it's part of a trend with fluffy mammals appearing in both The Ferryman and now hopping over to the Park Theatre here. A red/amber light.

Review Twilight Song

Twilight Song
by Kevin Elyot

Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Twilight Song, written by the late Kevin Elyot in 2014 just before his death, is an odd little playwriting confection about some odd fellows and a woman. 

Analyse it closely and it turns out to be a tawdry tale of impregnation, loans, property, possible professional fraud, furtive sexual encounters, time slippages and blackmail, all wrapped  in colourful tissue paper and tied with a great big ribbon bow.

We can't begin to add up all the self-consciously theatrical and cinematic styles it seems to go through - there's a touch of Rattigan, definitely some Noel Coward and Alfred Hitchcock, even a snippet of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Dickens and DH Lawrence (or is it EM Foster ...?) and, hey, is that Monty Python parody?

This is the première of Elyot's last play and, despite some sluggish moments, director Anthony Banks gives us a stylish production set on James Cotterill's wooden round stage living room with a settee, curved French windows, mahogany gramophone and a silver drinks' trolley to create a Scotch haze. 

It's a slickly, but rather mechanically, put together play and it rather feels as if the playwright put together the themes going around  rather than a deeply-felt piece. 

Maybe it was intended to go a bit deeper into the gay influence on literature, film and television and what this meant before and after 1967 legislation, yet this never really develops, even in metaphor.  

Still, after a slow and rather stilted beginning, the story does take hold. Barry (Paul Higgins) is a middle-aged gay retired pharmacist who lives with his mother in a North London Victorian villa. While she takes her regular weekly trip to Kent, he invites an estate agent (Adam Garcia) to give a valuation and other services. 

Centred on the house, this modern day encounter slips back to the 1960s and delicate girlish bride Isabella (Bryony Hannah) welcoming two old codgers into her marital home. 

Charles (Hugh Ross), an elderly doctor and seemingly someone's uncle. Harry (Philip Bretherton), a dodgy married solicitor, like Charles, seems well lodged in his current comfortable middle-class existence even if it seems the two men have a past. 

Slipping back and forth in time, by the end we can piece together the story and obtain a sense of an ending but, while it may have been meant as a satire or parody, it comes across as a rather lacklustre playwriting effort.

References to Conservative but pro Welfare State prime minister MacMillan and 1960s emigration to Australia are flagged up as well as a wife's thwarted career.

However, in the end it feels as if we've been lured to spy through the keyhole at a rather insubstantial and too self-satisfied mystery story and it's an amber light. 

Review The View From Nowhere

A playwright flags up his message too blatantly, says Francis Beckett, instead of allowing the implications of corporate cover-up to emerge from compelling drama.

The View From Nowhere
by Chuck Anderson

Test Tube Integrity
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

New playwriting needs the Park Theatre near Finsbury Park tube to continue airing theatrical experiences which might otherwise have stayed on their author’s computer hard drive.

Recalling my previous reviews on this blog, there's Jonathan Maitland’s Deny, Deny, Deny, about doping in sport, of which I wrote: “A very fine new play with a harsh contemporary feel.” 

I also predicted – and I stick to it – that the Park has made an important discovery in playwright and National Theatre book shop sales assistant, Michael Ross, after I saw his play Happy to Help.

But for a bold, radical theatre like the Park to succeed, it has to have the courage to fail sometimes. And this time, I’m afraid, it has.

Which is a shame, because The View from Nowhere comes from the same creative team that gave us the excellent Warehouse of Dreams, at The Lion And Unicorn, about refugee camps.

Th play starts out with the best of intentions.  It’s about a scientist who discovers the undesirable side effects of a chemical in which a big company has invested heavily and describes the ruthless methods by which it tries to discredit him and his work.

Good food for drama, this, and the author has done his research.  The trouble is that the play plods through the issues with all the dexterity of someone wading through treacle.

The scientist is black and has dreadlocks and he has a young, female assistant. I had a sinking feeling from the start when man from the chemical company – grey-suited, middle-aged, conventional – asks for Dr Washington.

He assumes the distinguished scientist could not possible be either of them – the one too young and too female, the other too black and too dreadlocked. And of course he cringes with embarrassment when he finds out that the black man is indeed Dr Washington.

Maybe twenty years ago that scene would have been worth doing. Now it’s too right-on, too virtuous for words and quite unbelievable. A chemical company executive would know something about a distinguished scientist he was about to visit.

I saw this scene coming and waited impatiently for playwright Chuck Anderson to get over proving his liberal credentials, so we could get on with the play.

Things do look up a bit after that.  There’s a decent plot (though not much of an ending) and the characters come over as real people.

There’s a good professional cast. In particular, Mensah Bediako makes an attractive and entertaining Dr Washington and Nina Toussaint-White a ruthless director of corporate affairs, Rona Worthing, with a touch of human decency.

The writer has taken the trouble to find out how the system works and how a big company can kill off uncomfortable truths.

These days, newspapers, as the director of corporate affairs says, will be delighted to accept a competently written article they do not have to pay for, especially if the same company is advertising, preferably in a sister paper. 

It’s also true, as one character tells us, that cash-strapped governments have outsourced environmental protection to the chemical industry.

The trouble is that nothing is left for us to work out; the lessons the writer wishes us to take away are carefully spelled out, to the point where I wondered if we were to be tested on them in the interval.

“Investigate his students” commands Ms Toussaint-White.  “Any hanky-panky going on there?”  Hanky panky, forsooth.

We’re told all these things, not shown them. And that makes The View From Nowhere, directed by Dan Phillips, a pamphlet on stage.  Quite a good pamphlet, but an amber light is the best I can do for it until it’s turned into a play

Review The Ugly One

Tim Gopsill finds a satire on identity and the body beautiful catches a zeitgeist but fails to fulfil its full potential.
 
The Ugly One
by Marius von Mayenberg

Face Value
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Marius von Mayenberg's 2007 black comedy is resonant in our age of selfies and self-branding,  revolving round the conceit anything can now be replicated  and mass produced.

In fact this German satire centres on a solo main premise and joke and, luckily, it is a clever one, even if there is a clunkiness about the accompanying gags and plot development.

When Lette (Charlie Dorfman), a brilliant electronics engineer, is considered by his bosses too ugly to promote his own invention, his assistant Karlmann (Arian Nik impressive in his debut professional role) gets the job and accompanying perks.

Lette then opts for what he assumes is an exclusive solution, plastic surgery turning him into the acknowledged most handsome man in the world and giving him back the gig for which he was originally so unceremoniously turned down.

However  he doesn't foresee the plastic surgeon (T'nia Miller) capitalising on the success of the brand she has created out of him and profiting from mass production, effectively making Lette obsolete.

His assistant and subsequent rival Karlmann emerges with an indentikit face. The two even end up competing for two women, Lette's wife Fanny and a businesswoman (both played by Indra Ové).  

The female roles involve a good deal of squirming and slinking about in a seductive fashion  at which, it must be said, Ové excels.

Lette's spouse Fanny gets most of the really corny laughs. As Lette’s invention is some kind of hardware plug, Fanny, in her seductive passages,  has so many cringeworthy gags about plugs, sockets and the like that it all skirts dangerously near to the tiresome.

Director Weise's and designer Loren Elstein’s staging is ingenious, using the Park 90. the smaller studio space, filling it with a square rostrum functioning as work desk, table and bed.

Meanwhile the floor space is also a projection screen (projection designer Louise Rhoades-Brown).

Weise has plenty of boisterous comic physicality in his production, but his direction also lacks a light touch.

The play deals with such an abstract issue in Maja Zade's translation, greater subtlety and a tad more whimsy in both the acting and the direction would have been welcome. Instead everything  feels rather signposted and heavy-handed.

The plot eventually takes its narcissistic logic to the extreme and this certainly is a play with an intriguing premise. It's energetically directed and acted by Weise and its four-strong cast with lighting by Amy Mae and sound by Giles Thomas.

However it needs more nuance, along with much sharper, pacier timing, to make the satire really sting and The Ugly One therefore gets an amber light.

Review Twitstorm

Twitstorm
by Chris England

Watch The Birdie
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

There are plays with plenty of talent on board which give tantalising glimpses of taking an original route. Except there's a chickening out or a failure to recognize the potential of the material and the plays  fall back on reheated plot points and gags.

Such a play, in our opinion, is Twitstorm. In fact Twitstorm is two plays wound awkwardly together.

One is an obvious TV-show-host-gets-embroiled-in-a-mistweeting-scandal. The other is what happens when the sponsor-an-African-child monthly direct debit is transformed into a living, breathing strapping lad who turns up unexpectedly on the doorstep. If you were switching channels to see what was on, which one would you choose?

Guy Manton (Jason Merrells) is the host of a TV panel show with a large following and the almost sure possibility of the format being exported to the US. His agent Rupert (Chris England, also Twitstorm's playwright) is handling the business side and it looks like the Stateside show will keep Guy as  host but jettison other long-term colleagues.

Guy's success is bolstered by wife Bex (Claire Goose) who is  a mildly successful chicklit authoress and in demand as the subject of women's interest magazine features. Even so, they suffer from the same first world problems as many couples, trying desperately to get off stage son Olly into the school of their choice.

Like many celebrities, Guy has someone else to manage his twitter account, long-term friend and show scriptwriter Neil (Justin Edwards) who does it all from his laptop which he carries around. It therefore ends up in Guy and Bex's home  - where Ike (Tom Moutchi) has previously arrived unexpectedly from the African state of Benin  - on the day of an end-of-series barbecue thrown for the show's staff.

We did laugh intermittently but there was little to surprise us in what was, in the end, an overwrought script. Frankly the celebrity who finds himself in the midst of the eponymous Twitstorm, partly because he doesn't seem to want to understand the new-fangled social media, would be, at the very least, very last century if Twitter had been invented then.

But shaming can come equally as an audio or video recording. Twitter is magnified publication. Yes, the Twitter beast has to be fed, just as once did the mass readership tabloid beast - but the material has to be there in the first place.

The most precarious and excruciating Twitter shaming has often been corporate man or woman with a personal account and unintentional 140 character or less ambiguity. Twitter also often gets exercised by events that start on that cutting edge part of modern broadcast technology, the radio. 

The African child story did pique our interest. However, in trying to have a twist that the African is not as unknowing as he seems, Twitstorm unfortunately turns an out-of-date, if it were ever in-date, idiot savant story into what many would consider an equally, if not more, offensive belligerent stereotype.  

There is a fine cast, given pacey direction by Jonathan Lewis, for the laboured plot, in spite of an attempt to bring in couched political and historical points of reference.

But why have such references if, for example, most of the audience is unlikely to have an in-depth knowledge of the history of Benin and you need to drill a bit further on Google to discover any Ike Eisenhower connection to Ike? (Ike Eisenhower was the first American president to recognise the independence of Benin). 

We were prepared to give Twitstorm leeway at the interval wondering if there would be an inspired  second act but it seemed to rely on the old implicit "it was all a dream" or "he's been driven mad by the whole affair" to explain some unlikely plot twists and rants. 

This felt like a play that may have started with the title. Then there seems to have been a lack of recognition of a possibly much stronger story in which Twitter either was unnecessary or  a minor part and an attempt to combine the two ended up with some unintended consequences. Oh dear, a bit like an unintended mistweet and so it's a red/amber light.

Review tick, tick ... BOOM!

tick, tick ... BOOM!
Book, Music And Lyrics by Jonathan Larson

The Next Big (Fat-Free But Tasty) Musical
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

What, reviewing the late Jonathan Larson's early musical when one hasn't even seen Rent, his celebrated riff on La Bohème? TLT and the engine beneath her wings feel they should come clean but, on the other hand, they come to Tick, Tick ... Boom! with a clean slate and ready to be entertained.

Tick, Tick ... Boom! appears to be an apprentice musical in more ways than one. Larson, who was also an actor, performed it as a solo rock show from 1990.  It slides, deliberately we think, from beginner's promise but structural clunkiness into something more sophisticated as the song styles and book grow in complexity.

It's highly autobiographical - the central character is a struggling aspiring songwriter called Jon who, like Larson, waits on tables while he awaits his big break. He is turning from 29 to the big 3-Oh (that's oh-oh!). His dance teacher girlfriend Susan aches to break away from tutoring weathy little 'uns for her own big break. But she also longs for the stability of marriage and suburban life.

That's not to be confused with Jon's (and Larson's) first attempt at a musical, the unfinished scifi Superbia, one song of which, Come To Your Senses, David Auburn, who revised Tick, Tick ... Boom!, incorporated into the later show.

Auburn turned Tick, Tick... Boom!, after Larson's premature death, from a solo musical monologue to a revamped chamber musical three-hander, its present form.

Jon (Chris Jenkins from The Burnt Part Boys) spends his time working in a diner, smoking joints on the rooftop of his Soho apartment in between working on his musical.

However spiritually he agonizes as his birthday approaches and his dreams of a produced musical remain unfulfilled.

He is still close to Michael (Jordan Shaw) with whom he grew up and went to summer camp. Michael though has long abandoned his own dream to become an actor to chase the mighty dollar in a Madison Avenue advertising firm, gain a coveted swish car (hey, what's wrong with that?, demands TLT's automotive sidekick indignantly!) and a luxury pad.

Director Bronagh Lagan's production takes a little while to setttle down with a few technical  hiccups - Jordan Shaw gives the most consistent performance from start to finish but all the cast come good with eventually outstanding performances from Jenkins and Saker.

The song most often picked out from this youthful work is the diner parody Sunday of Jon and Larson's real-life mentor Stevie's Sunday from Sunday In The Park With George where the order of Art (with a capital A)  becomes an order of an omelette with no yolks, "That why you're a wait-er!".

That's Stevie as in Stephen Sondheim, not Stevie as in Stevia the sugar-free substitute. A sugar-free substitute being the product at the centre of a doomed advertising industry opportunity which Michael sets up for his friend

But the song we loved was the fast-paced psychobabble of the phone call song with a Country & Western twang, Therapy, yet is there also a touch of old style classic musicals and Sesame Street?

Nik Cottall's excellent versatile set goes a long way to giving the production an atmospheric shape, changing seamlessly from apartment to rooftop to diner to office space and even workshop area.. Ben M Rogers' matches him with (pardon the pun!) spot on lighting which also clearly defines the locations of the various scenes but also adds emotional depth when needed. 

Musical director Gareth Bretherton on keyboards is seen through a gauze screen while the three other members of the band on guitar, bass and drums are up above on the balcony. At one point they also  become participants in the Madison Avenue brainstorming parliament - even those musicians perched above away with the birds! 

This is one of those fascinating evenings where non-cognoscenti like TLT and her motorised chariot (and nearing the end of this review, we still haven't seen Rent!) can appreciate some of the technical processes of a developing musical theatre writer without their eyes glazing over.

Because we also pride ourselves that in terms of musical theatre, we're the ordinary punters with unlearned opinions who nevertheless can google and gather knowledge, we know now that Jonathan Larson sadly died as a result of  undiagnosed Marfan Syndrome.

Despite a few technical glitches and Philip Michael Thomas's choreography feeling a little squeezed into the space, the whole experience, whether with or without the woeful background, was a green light from us - oh, and we look forward to catching Rent if not on the current tour then in a future incarnation!

Review Madame Rubinstein

Madame Rubinstein
by John Misto

Making Up Is Hard To Do
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The name of Helena Rubinstein lives on as a brand, although now owned by L'Oréal. Her story, and that of cosmetics' rival Elizabeth Arden, has recently been part of a flurry of activity with a 2007 documentary, a couple of biographies and a Broadway musical.

Now Miriam Margolyes takes up the cudgels as the heavily accented, flamboyant, battling Madame Rubinstein near the end of her life in a play by Australian writer John Misto.

Her dark hair scraped back, Rubinstein, who was born in Austro-Hungarian Krakow, cultivated an "exotic" look with bright clothes and sparkling jewels while her salon brand had glamour but also retained a severe scientific aura of the medical laboratories where she may have studied in her youth.

The story of the cosmetics' tycoon (and also Australia's first entrepreneur of global fame) making her way in an industry, which like the movie business allowed in enterprising souls excluded from other trades, should make for a rich and fascinating tale..

However the play feels thin and conflicted - pulled between her relationship with her secretary, Irish journalist Patrick O'Higgins (Jonathan Forbes) and  Rubinstein's rivalry with Frances Barber's Elizabeth Arden (currently also charted in musical War Paint on Broadway) without any real dramatic storytelling.

Instead it settles into a clichéd two hours filled mostly with apocryphal incidents and the habits of "Madame". Margoyles tries to inject a sense of wit and, towards the end, pathos to the portrait of the make-up pioneer. However the script militates against this, failing to capitalize on hints of something more complex and falling back on stereotypes and gags.

It's a shame because a bit of shrewd digging might have brought about a more orignal concoction - for example, her considerable drive leading to Australian connections and success is reduced to mental scars and memories of alleged sexual abuse by a relative.

The way her make up and salon brand developed, taking cosmetics out of the theatre and whore house and making it a part of a respectable woman's routine, is equally downplayed.

An intriguing reference to later women's lib protests against her personally and the cosmetics' industry is mentioned but despite her own protests that she made women "free", there's no social context. Instead we're treated to exaggerated Yiddishkeit and wilful, some would say psychotic, characteristics rather than a sense of someone who had built up a business from nothing. 

An advertising image dominates Alistair Turner's design in director Jez Bond's production which has a cartoonish sketch-like feel with some clumsy scene changes.

There's definitely a bioplay in Helena Rubinstein's life but this piece variously shoehorns her life into every other template, apart from truly investigating dramatically her story.  So, despite strong casting, we fear it's a lipstick and casing red/amber light.

Review A Dark Night In Dalston

Reviewer Peter Barker recognises the disquiet and desires of  two very different London residents in an appealing new play.

A Dark Night In Dalston
by Stewart Permutt

The Odd Couple
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

This new play, A Dark Night in Dalston is certainly a visit to a dark place, but the resolution of this touching comedy drama also leaves hope for the future.

The 90-minute offering from writer Stewart Permutt and director Tim Stark is set in contemporary Dalston, traditionally a rough part of London's East End.

Young Jewish accountant Gideon (Joe Coen) finds himself seeking refuge from racist thugs in the social-housing flat of mother and carer Gina (Michelle Collins).

Gideon is well outside his manor, which is Stanmore at the leafy end of the tube's Jubilee Line rather than the concrete monoliths of the capital's inner city.

He’s in the wrong area. But why? For, we learn, despite his religious observance, all is not quite what it seems or should be in Gideon's life.

To compound his immediate troubles, dusk is setting in on Friday evening, the beginning of  the Jewish sabbath. As a devout Jew, he is forbidden at that time from taking public transport or exchanging money and so has no way to get safely  home.

The kindness of a stranger, Gina, gives him sanctuary from his attackers. A former nurse and now a carer for her bed-bound husband,  she's older than Gideon, old enough to be his mother, she says.

She is trapped too; by her husband and by a troubled past leading to her quitting the nursing profession.

This unlikely pair meet, bond, argue, dance beautifully, take solace, find despair and move on throughout this single evening.

For both, the joy and hope of meeting someone new is set against their continuing real-life problems and finding common, if dark, ground. But this is a dark comedy, not a tragedy.

And thank God for that. As it is revealed the depths of despair have led both of them to contemplate the same course of action, the play came unnervingly close to this reviewer's own experience; so true, it seems not to be theatre. But the sincerity and humour of this play turns the unbearable to the bearable.

It is to the writer’s credit that he has created two believable characters, charting a difficult story with an up-to-date resonance. 

Permutt has a history of writing strong and complex female roles. Collins is a joy to watch as Gina, relishing her character and telling her tough tale; she’s working class, clever, compassionate, mixed-up and has been dealt a bad hand in her adult life.

Coen as Gideon is not merely a foil to Gina; he too is convincing in a role that is as real and as sexy as that of Collins.

Stark’s direction keeps the focus on the words in Permutt’s excellent script, while maintaining and stepping up the momentum of the play.

There is also Simon Daw’s ingenious backdrop - a stylised photo of council flats which also manages to double up as old-fashioned living room wallpaper.

This two-hander turns out to be a moving piece about modern Londoners thrown together in unexpected circumstances and a dark East End night merits a bright green TLT light.

Review Killing Time

Killing Time
by Zöe Mills

Whose Life Is It Anyway?
http://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Hester is  a feisty elderly woman used to getting her own way. A once celebrated concert cellist, her decline has now been sealed by a diagnosis of cancer.

Living alone, she exists mainly on a diet of Rioja wine and pills but remains financially independent and surprisingly hip with a wireless connection allowing former PA George (Robin Herford) to contact her via Skype.

So life, even when facing death, continues. There's episodes of Corrie to watch. Surrounded by packing boxes, she plays the cello on a plastic bath stool and gulps her pills.

That's until Sarah, apparently a trainee social worker, shows up and disrupts Hester's erratic routine of cello playing, wine drinking, prescription pill popping, receiving Skype messages and TV watching.

This is essentially a two-hander starring mother and daughter Brigit Forsyth and Zöe Mills, the latter also the writer of the play. Or maybe two plays - for this feels like two character pieces stitched together: A mystery surrounding Sarah with a 21st century social media fetish and Hester's pugnacious hermit-like existence trapped between her previous international, and sometimes salacious, lifestyle and her current vulnerability.

There's certainly a plot, but despite an obviously deliberate decision to leave it inferred, it's somewhat muffled by the character studies of Hester and Sarah. We thought we could also detect a subtext dealing with changes in television and the National Health Service. Yet all these elements do feel yoked together which somewhat deadens the pace of the script.

The plausibility of a dying woman left almost entirely alone except for a phone call from social services also begs questions. However this is perhaps not beyond the realms of possibility as a recent celebrity death in a luxury apartment block illustrates.

The design of Paul Colwell cleverly inserts packing box shapes in the wall which could equally be dated 1960s' décor and also manages to include a revolve to reflect Hester's mental state. Kostis Mousikos and Alan Walsh's projections encompass George's Skyping, evoke the mood of Sarah's outside life and time travels through Hester's past, alongside mystic offstage cello notes (sound design by Harry Johnson) .

At the same time, it struck us, the projections give a clue that this is again a theatre piece which might not show the seams so much on screen.  On stage this feels like a workmanlike writing debut for Mills. So, it's an amber light for a piece with solid performances directed by Antony Eden with an eye to the play's potential.

Review Raising Martha

Raising Martha
by David Spicer

Shallow Grave
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Traffic Light Theatregoer here - your detective inspector of plays. And here's a clue that's been mildly puzzling for your theatrical bobby and her thespian vehicle.

School dissection of frogs - that had disappeared from TLT's curriculum by the time she got to Biology GCE.  So the mention of 'O' Levels rather than GCSEs certainly felt strange in David Spicer's intermittently funny farce at the Park Theatre set in a contemporary farm for breeding frogs  so that school kids can cut them up.

Hands up all schools which still dissect frogs?

We're not sure they still exist, so it's not surprising that Gerry Duffy (Stephen Boxer), a tune in, drop out left over beatnik from the '60s and '70s, has decided to diversify after jointly inheriting the farm from his deceased mother, the eponymous Martha.

It's the grave of Martha, the frog farming matriarch, which has also been targeted by clod digging and hopping eternal student-type animal activists. That's Jago (Joel Fry), so aggressive we wondered he might be an agent provocateur (we're not giving anything away), and his passively sweet accomplice Marc (Tom Bennett). They're out to close down the farm using Martha's remains as a ransom bargaining chip dug up on the upper tier of designer Rebecca Brower's two-tier set.   

Then back to Gerry who, as we have said, has seen the market for dissection and vivisection vanish  Ah, maybe he's gone into farming culinary veterbrates, you may think. But no. Be prepared to suspend disbelief again. Using the  dwindling market for educational frogs as a front (?!!!),  he's gone straight across to breeding psychoactive toads alongside growing pot, producing a particularly hallucinogenic form of wacky baccy.

We have to admit, even in the fantastic world of farce, we were a little bemused by this leap (leap, geddit, ribbit?) in logic, but we were willing to suspend disbelief. Even if the never-mentioned leap in electricity and water usage and the bills might have been a clue for the blundering but politically savvy Ortonesque Detective Inspective Clout (Drop The Dead Donkey's Jeff Rawle).  After all, it could be a Gerry hallucination in his drug-addled existence.

Besides all this, there's Gerry's brother, co-beneficiary and snobbish would-be entrepreneur Roger (Julian) who has a hate-hate relationship with his brother, and Roger's daughter Caro (Gwyneth Keyworth) who has her own agenda in this amphibian environment.  

Director Michael Fentiman, along with the cast, have obviously put in a lot of very hard work to keep the momentum of this farce going. But there's no disguising a script where often the gags and set-ups have come first, shoehorned in rather than placed for coherent reasons, even in this caricatured environment.

There are also more cryptic serious elements introduced regarding policing and even an askance look at the Cold War. But these do not feel especially organically thought through in the plot. And some parts of the plot, such as the six-foot amphibians, feel more suited to sketch comedy, radio or cartoon than a stage play

It may have worked for us if it had been shorter and tighter. But as a two-act comedy, it is a play held together by the fragile algae of an energetic cast and diligent direction. So it's an amber light for a froggy piece that doesn't manage to reach princely status, but remains a bit of a tadpole.

Review The Albatross 3rd & Main

The Albatross 3rd & Main
by Simon David Eden

Let Us Prey
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Somewhere beneath the morass of literary, TV and movie references blanketing The Albatross 3rd & Main, there could be a useful little comedy, probably one for the movies.

Unfortunately that tale gets lost in all the self-regarding references which halt the action and make the cast, playing otherwise clearly delineated characters, lose their bearings.

Directed and designed by writer Simon David Eden, it's perfectly well-staged in a detailed and evocative set, a convincing American roadside general store. But it may have been a wiser decision to bring in another director to look at the play's structure and make the verbals sing and zing for the stage.

Instead of three men and a baby, it's three men and a golden eagle. A dead golden eagle which can command big sums on the black market.

For the Golden Eagle (which we note is the national bird of Mexico), along with the bald headed eagle, the national emblem of the United States, are protected species. Even aiding and abetting the possession of or harming a feather on the back of these birds means law enforcement agents of the Fish & Wildlife Agency will be on your back.

Not a good situation when you are storekeeper Gene (Hamish Clark) who has already in desperation transferred his shop into the name of another man (Andrew St Clair-James) to lessen his responsibility for the thousands of dollars of debts accrued by his feckless wife from whom he is separated.

So when local mobster Ricky aka Spider (Charlie Allen) walks in with a dead golden eagle in a blood spattered box, the avian equivalent of the corpse-in-the-boot in gangster movie Good Fellas, it's enough to drive a guy nuts - and paranoid.

TLT immediately felt there was more than a nod towards Tracy Letts' Bug, recently seen in Charing Cross Road. And this, with constant allusions to Coleridge's poem Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, shades of detective serial Columbo and numerous other book and broadcast references, felt glaringly shoehorned in.

Yet the basic premise of three guys roped together into covering up their possession of an illegal eagle (yes, the roadkill tale turns out to be a tall tale)  has plenty of potential. But the plot seems to disintegrate with only three or four artificially forced pivotal pieces of action.

Still, when the supposed zingers slow down (the diction sometimes leaves something to be desired) in a few moments within the second act, there's some space for the script and acting to breathe. But otherwise this is a far too self-conscious a play which also tries to pile in  economic and political metaphors galore instead of concentrating on what could be a strong story.

The location is apparently Massachussets but the trio struggle with sometimes very uncertain American accents and diction.

Hoodlum Spider -- - think  a Damon Runyon character crossed with James Cagney. Punch drunk ex-boxer Louis aka Lullaby (St Clair-James) approaches Of Mice And Men's gentle giant Lenny. Hamish Clark finds his rhythm and eventually manages to nail storekeeper Gene, in spite of the playwright's verbose script and lack of investment in story and plotting.

For, with a firmer plot and less clunky clever-clever allusion, this might have been quirky, thoughtful and exciting, but, as it is, it's the lower range of an  amber light for what feels like an opportunity missed.

Review Luv

Luv
by Murray Schisgal

The Graduates
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The spelling of Luv, according to the New York Times, as "luv" was popularised by New Yorker Murray Schisgal's 1963 manic lampoon on the vagaries of marriage, divorce, success and failure in life. So covering more or less - er - everything.

The play, first produced in London before opening to great acclaim in New York the following year, is a period piece, in its satire firmly rooted in the theatre scene of the 1950s and 1960s and the sensibility of "GI Bill" East Coast writers.

Two former college buddies meet fifteen years later by chance on Brooklyn Bridge. Time has not treated the once brilliant scholar, now desperate, dishevelled would-be suicide Harry (Charlie Dorfman) kindly. It seems life has see-sawed in favour of stockbroker Milton (Nick Barber).

However Milton, who is unhappily married and unable to divorce his wife to live with his lover, sees an opportunity amongst the trash and detritus of Harry's (single) life.

It's less murderous than the later comedy "Throw Momma From The Train" (based on Hitchcock's Strangers On the Train),  but Milton engineers a swap.  Milton, certain they will hit it off and marry, determines to (and does) transfer his wife Ellen (Elsie Bennett) to Harry.

Sure enough, his plan comes to fruition in the absurdist manner of the play which combines social and sociological satire using vaudeville and musical theatre tropes.

Luv turns out to be a rather quaint piece, in many ways an extended sketch, even if a bitter cyclical political and economic allegorical strain lies beneath,  It seems to be drawing on the same atmosphere as Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot  where The Kinsey Report, a sociological report on sexual behaviour, merited a mention in the lyrics.

Even so, while being thoroughly steeped in New York from the same pool as SJ Perelman,  Neil Simon and Woody Allen,  French intellectualism comes in as an equal runner in the parody stakes - in the shapely form of Ellen (name shortened to Elle), over-educated for a housewife but torn between a wish for motherhood and a career.

Set against Max Dorey's evocative backdrop with sunset sky and grey bridge girders, this is a play depending very much on sharp direction and the timing and talent for farce displayed by the three-strong cast.

Nicely stylized in both performance and costumes, and despite a short break owing to technical difficulties on press night, the attention to detail pays off.

Nick Barber's Milton changes from flatpack 1920s' jock to a more complex 1960s' creature. Meanwhile Charlie Dorfman manages to embody childlike Harry saved from drowning with deadpan physical humour.  Elsie Bennett as the put-upon Ellen turns from sneering fur-coated kept wife to Left Bank intellectual hottie with aplomb.

We can't pretend we didn't find this a determinist sketch stretched out to two acts, but it still held us all the way through. It's a curio of a play which is just as iconic of a cultural moment as The Graduate.

Yet as TV invaded the homes of citizens then, so we are now living in the age of the internet. There's still room for Luv to resonate in our computerized times and it's an upper range amber light from TLT.

Review The Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters
by CS Lewis
Adapted for the stage by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske

The Devil's Doublethink
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The Screwtape Letters was a resounding first populist literary success for Oxford don and BBC radio personality CS Lewis. Written originally in 1941 for a Christian periodical, this production has Screwtape (Max McLean, also co-writer and director), a senior devil clad in red and gold smoking jacket, displaying the  urbanity of a Varsity don or an eminently clubbable civil servant.

He leans back in a well-worn leather chair after a college dinner and dictates letters to his personal secretary, a scaly creature called Toadpipe (Karen Eleanor Wight).

His job is to instruct his unseen Junior Tempter nephew, Wormwood, an apprentice in devilry, He advises his young relative in the art and science of luring an earth-bound Englishman away from Christianity into the clutches of the devil and hell.

Ominously the Englishman, as if the demons are unable to turn the hapless citizen into a criminal, is turned Soviet-style into a "Patient" with the diabolical duo of uncle and nephew as psychiatrists-gone-wrong, experimenting on the best way to lead him down the Primrose path.

Indeed Lewis, a one-time atheist turned Christian, himself described the Hell portrayed in his book as "the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern". This adaptation brings in some contemporary concerns  and tries to find some relatively modern (but at least one rather clunky) cultural equivalents.

It also adds the scaly creature called Toadpipe, barely mentioned in the book, who acts as Screwtape's scribe, climbing a spiralling ladder to push the letters into a pneumatic tube - a brightly coloured stream of neon light signalling delivery. 

It is tempting to think that Lewis was intent on solely bringing theological arguments in a populist style to a wide audience. The novella and play suck us into a reverse world where Hell is the establishment, the boss Satan is "Our Father Below" and God is only named as "The Enemy".

However, listening carefuly to the fairly faithful stage rendition of this epistolary novella, it dawned on us Lewis in his own way seems to be commenting on the state of the world, including shifting alliances, during World War II. 

Indeed we even picked up resemblances to the later work of another BBC radio personality George Orwell. The theatre programme offers us Lewis's comment that the Screwtape Letters deals with "... the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin'" A very Orwellian image, Orwell, like many of his contemporaries, being influenced by James Burnham's analysis The Managerial Revolution.

Orwell also uses the biblical drink wormwood at the end of 1984 and, as in 1984, there may be a touch of the BBC hierarchy as well as an Oxbridge Senior Common Room in Screwtape's quarters. This seems to have been picked up in this production's design decision to add a pneumatic letter tube, commonly used by the BBC at the time and in Orwell's 1984.

Meanwhile devils, we learn, have previously feasted on human souls, but now Hell, like Britain in time of war, is on short rations. And of course, instead of Big Brother, we have Our Father Below, along with a subtle propagandist in Screwtape who advises, "... the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without milestones or signposts".

Yet the propagandist Screwtape also has to negotiate a tricky path through the internal politics of hell with its infernal police and intelligence agency. 

Of course this is all very well for an analysis of the text, but The Screwtape Letters in this case is a stage adaptation.

The play takes place on the larger of the Park Theatre stages, but feels as if  it should be in a more intimate space.

The design by Cameron Anderson subtly uses small paving stones as partial concentric circles  of Hell with skulls and bones piled up in the backdrop reminiscent of the Cambodian and other twentieth century genocides. But, powerful and distressing as they are, these become on stage static symbols.

They are densely packed in, in the same way as the letters and their arguments are packed into the script. The reflections on social change, the intertwining of theology, domestic and international politics and human nature are blunted off the book page in what is essentially, a series of lectures.

While Toadpipe is also tacked on as a symbolic Everyman (and, more rarely, woman) figure as well as amanuensis to provide variation, the action on stage becomes increasingly repetitive rather than gaining in visceral power.

Nevertheless the premise of the story has undoubted power. It even seems surprising to us that early on after publication filmmakers never picked up on The Screwtape Letters as the springboard for a movie, for example, in the style of Powell and Pressburger's later A Matter of Life And Death.

In the meantime, while it might send the curious to read the book, it's a lower end of an amber light for a play where the devil is overloaded with verbal detail.