The people behind the zombie movie Shaun of the Dead are calling it the first rom-zom-com. But they were arguably beaten to it by David Kane's 1994 farce, given a welcome revival here for the first time in a decade. The corpses that litter Kane's stage are not strictly zombies, but they have a very similar way of twitching back into life. Meanwhile, a kind of romance develops between an evangelical devil-hunter masquerading as a man from the social security and a young music-hall entertainer masquerading as an elderly writer of hymns.
Set in a theatrical boarding house in the early 1960s, Dumbstruck is about wannabe singing sensation Johnny Ramone (Keith Fleming in fine full-voiced form) whose failure to make his mark on the world of entertainment leads him to thoughts of suicide and jealous murder. It happens that the new resident, magician Herman Katz, sidelines in mercy killing. So once Johnny has overdosed on uppers rather than downers, the scene is set for a manic black comedy of murder, confusion and cover-up.
To detail any more subplots - of which there are many - would only be to emphasise the daftness of it all. Kane's skill is to make us accept the devil-worshipping, the sex-change operations and his line-up of over-the-top characters for as long as it takes him to get the next laugh in. The preposterousness is part of the fun. It all adds up to a play with the darkness of Orton (if not his cruelty) and the pace of a Brian Rix farce.
If it stopped for a moment, the whole shaky edifice would come tumbling down, but James Brining's production never lets up and the actors never miss an opportunity to make their cartoon characters colourful. A rum zom-rom-com indeed.
· Until April 17. Details: 01382 223 530.
