In TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, the four knights who killed the archbishop Thomas Beckett briefly step forward to justify their actions. Paul Webb's play, which was originally produced at the Tricycle in 1999 and is often seen in the regions, is a two-and-a-half-hour version of that self-justification without, alas, Eliot's wit or poetry. The play may be a comedy, but you wouldn't know it from this limp production.
The story follows the four men after they have made "the worst career move in history". Abandoned by the king on whose behalf they believed they were acting, excommunicated by the Pope and with public outrage growing, the four took refuge in Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire where they stayed in self-imprisonment for over a year before disappearing from history.
Webb's idea to put flesh and bones on these four footnotes from history is a good one, if only he hadn't treated it as an episode of Men Behaving Badly as jointly written by Catherine Cookson and Jean-Paul Sartre. It is hard to know which is worst: the extended turd jokes, the romantic sub-plot or the existential musings about the meaning of life and the existence of God. The more the play strives for emotional truth, the more contrived and lacking in subtlety it seems. It can't escape its own blokeishness.
Perhaps a less clumsy production, without the awkward scene changes and snail's pacing, would show the play in a more favourable light. Peter Hugo Daly at least has a real presence as the violent and damaged Fitz, and Juliet Howland, in an impossible role as the walking, talking doomed love interest, survives with dignity intact. The rest of the acting is just posturing and is far too obvious.
· Until April 17. Box office: 020 8237 1111.
