Think of Neil Simon and you think of two temperamentally unsuited middle-aged men bickering in a Manhattan apartment. Well think again: director Jacob Murray has sought out Simon's earliest Broadway work, and it turns out to be about two temperamentally unsuited younger men bickering in pretty much the same way.
Domineering Jewish Pa Baker presides over an artificial fruit business, but his sons Alan and Buddy are more interested in wild oats than wax grapes. Yet this 1961 comedy contains all the seeds of Simon's later work, being an examination of regressive male behaviour given dissolute domestic living arrangements and an apparently limitless supply of comely broads upstairs.
Murray's production has a beguiling freshness and fizz, though in his early years Simon was a far less authorative dramatist than he later became. The phone rings, the front door flaps and compromising encounters are engineered with almost manic ingenuity. An entire 15-minute sequence is spun out around the characters' inability to find a pencil.
But the cast produce plenty of neatly executed comic turns: commitment-shy Alan (Jamie Glover) is smoothly plausible when smoothing over his impatient girlfriend Connie (Sarah-Louise Young) with the bachelor logic: "Honey, there are ways in which a 33-year-old guy is much younger than a 24-year-old girl." Andrew Langtree's puppyish Buddy steams with evaporating wetness behind his ears, and Malcolm Rennie's wheedling wax-fruit magnate is a wonderfully square-framed vulgarian.
Rennie also makes off with the prize for the show's best line. When apprised of Buddy's ambition to become a writer the old man barks: "Plays close, television you can turn off, wax fruit stays in the bowl until you're 100." Strangely, Simon's Broadway debut feels box fresh precisely because it's artificial to the core.
· Until June 25. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
