I have great regard for Sam Mendes. But just why his new production company, Scamp, should kick off by importing this off-Broadway comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire remains a mystery: it's one of those untransportable American plays that, in rejecting social conformism and political correctness, ends up celebrating anything dysfunctional.
Everyone in the play has a problem. Its heroine, Claire, is suffering from stress-related amnesia. One day she is abducted by her supposed brother: a lisping, limping, facially scarred figure clearly on the run. He whisks Claire off to the rural home of her stroke-afflicted mother where they are joined by a whimsical fugitive whose chief companion is a manacled hand-puppet. With the arrival of Claire's husband and pothead son, the stage is set for the revelation of the real relationships and the cause of the heroine's trauma.
In part, the play is a throwback to those period comedies such as Arsenic and Old Lace and You Can't Take It With You in which wackiness was a sign of liberating individualism. Lindsay-Abaire is also clearly reacting against the circumspect good taste of the Broadway disability-play. But, while all this may have resonance in America, it means little to us here. And when you compare the play with the work of a writer like Peter Nichols, who genuinely wrings pained laughter from domestic disaster, you realise how glibly mechanical Lindsay-Abaire's approach is.
Odd scenes spark a wry smile. In one, Claire's pursuing husband tries to impress his dope-smoking son by announcing: "I know the siren-call of ganja, Kenny." But the humour in the speech impediments of a stroke-victim, however well played by Julia McKenzie, passes me by. And, in its desperation to overturn suburban normality, the play comes close to suggesting that the damaged are privileged.
A hybrid Anglo-American cast does little to reconcile me to the play's strenuous reversal of accepted values, although Kate Finneran makes something touching out of Claire's amnesiac confusion and Nicholas Le Prevost is passably funny as her onetime druggie husband. But Angus Jackson's production strives over-hard to create an atmosphere of spiralling mayhem. And, in its jokily determined celebration of off-the-wall eccentricity, the play simply proves that too many kooks spoil the broth.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0870 145 1163.
