Literally literary tosh

I stumbled out of the semi subterranean darkness of the Menier Chocolate Factory into a dreary Sunday afternoon and found myself passing the giant figure of David Babani, its Artistic Director, in the bar. Under his leadership this tiny fringe venue has produced a host of exciting new and successful revivals of musicals and a succession of bland and dreary plays. I had hoped that "The Common Pursuit", their latest non-musical offering, might break this pattern.

I had just sat through two hours of a twenty five year old play about a bunch of Cambridge graduates who set up a literary publication. The bumf from the Chocolate Factory describes this as a "sharp comedy" which is "as defined a study of friendship now as it was when it was first performed". More of that later.

Babani, as Producer, and Director Fiona Laird have gathered together an extraordinary hotchpotch of mostly unsuitable performers in Nigel Harman (housewives' favourite from Eastenders), James Dreyfus (mincing directly from one gay character to another on the small screen and more recently in "The Producers" and "Cabaret" on the West End) and Reece Shearsmith (as grotesque here as when one of the "League of Gentlemen"). Along side them are Ben Caplin, Robert Portal and Mary Stockley each of whom I'd seen previously on stage but not elsewhere.

The two room box set which transported us from a Trinity College bedroom to a London Office by gliding into the wings was carefully constructed and marvelously realistic to look at, but somewhat spoiled by hollow wooden booming sounds as the actors stomped their way around the MDF floor.

Hollow and wooden, I'm afraid, is all that can be said about most of the performances. Beginning when they're all at University, the opening scene (and subsequent epilogue) was a peculiar picture. I've sat in many an eccentric Oxbridge meeting and observed nothing quite as bizzare as this cliché ridden parody of eccentricity. Nigel Harman's caddish "Lone Ranger" managed throughout to channel Frank Spencer as he nasally flounced around the stage. Reece Shearsmith, whose character was revealed to have emphysema as the painful entertainment concluded, was certainly not cast for his ability to cough realistically. James Dreyfus' performance was tolerably restrained, but his gay character was subjected to a sexual denouement so outmoded that it achieved merely groans from the audience members around me. What plot was left had to be carried by the three lesser known actors, who did so adequately, if not with flair.

The decline of the idealisitic students into intellectually bored adults appeared nothing more than mundane and inevitable in this production and mirrored my progression as the minutes ticked by. As a study of friendship, the tales of Simon Gray's characters seemed to be no more telling than those in an Ayckbourn farce, and far less amusing.

In all this was a fairly dreary afternoon of comedy which seemed to have lost any sharpness under a mound of dust in the two decades since it was written. I wonder, even then, if the sexual improprieties were all _that_ shocking.

Let's hope the Factory's next offering, rumoured to be a Lippa show, will be a return to musical form.