Billy Liar

In Keith Waterhouse's 1959 novel, Billy Fisher is a teenage clerk in an undertaker's business who dreams of scriptwriting stardom. His hyper-imaginative reworkings of his drab life in a Yorkshire town get him into scrapes of escalating severity (two fiancees, one ring, an empty petty cash tin and two missing brass coffin plates). The stage adaptation, written by Waterhouse in 1960 with Willis Hall, fuses kitchen sink slice-of-life drama with drawing-room farce and Colin Richmond's design wittily sets the action in kitschly naturalistic downstairs rooms encased in a box set where supposedly parallel lines are skewed to collide at a point just out of sight beyond a kitchen sink. But, dressed in a shapeless, sleeveless woollen jumper and baggy trousers, Paul-Ryan Carberry's Billy looks less like a desperate youth struggling to discover his identity and more like an apathetic twentysomething sponging on his family, cheating on women and thieving from his employer. In spite of engaging performances (particularly Gillian Bevan as Mother), it becomes increasingly hard to enjoy Billy's inept attempts to extricate himself from the problems he has created.