The week draws to a close with the earliest significant snow for some years, and the first Christmas turkey, appropriately American, crash-landing in Hampstead on Thanksgiving night. Fortunately, the New End theatre used to be a morgue, which is undoubtedly the best place for Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna's excruciating 1980 comedy – a bizarrely unattractive romance set in a New York apartment on Christmas Eve in which a wacky failed actress holds a commercials director hostage for love.
The New End clearly thinks it is offering us an early screwball Christmas present. But, with its needy heroine who has overdosed on Liza Minnelli-style kookiness and its bland romantic hero, it is only those who exist on an unrelieved diet of straight-to-DVD Hollywood romances and self-help books who won't be demanding to return this "gift". The principal message seems to be that kidnapping and wearing a tutu is the path to true love and success.
Theda Blau is a would-be playwright, currently penning a six-act, one-woman epic about an unknown Russian writer, who turns up late for an audition one Christmas Eve. She doesn't get the job, but she does get the man, Vito Pignoli, who stops off at her flat on his way to a date with a supermodel. Soon Theda is prancing around in nothing but her fur coat and sprinkling emotional fairy dust everywhere, as a blizzard and Vito's bad back improbably conspire to keep him in her home until he has proposed marriage, a writing partnership and a happy-ever-after. The problem with happy-ever-after is that it goes on for ever, like this play.
Carol Lawson's Theda can't keep her clothes on, Anthony Green's Vito can't keep his accent in place, and the writers can't seem to stop themselves from throwing estranged or dead children on the merrily burning pyre of sentimental tosh when they can't think of any other course of action. "I have no talent," cries Vito as he considers giving up his career and becoming a full-time writer. It's clearly not going to stop him or the deluded Theda, and it clearly didn't stop the writers of this painfully contrived piece of wish-fufilment.
