Charlotte and George Benson (Joan Collins and Frank Langella) are former Broadway stars reduced to playing in the provinces, and to the gallery, in 1950s America. Passed over by the movies, and with TV snapping at their heels, they think their big break might have finally come when legendary movie director Frank Capra flies in to catch a matinee performance.
All theatre demands a suspension of disbelief, but Ken Ludwig's backstage farce requires a suspension of disbelief so massive that it's as if an elephant has suddenly wandered onstage and blocked out the view. You have to believe there's no business like showbusiness, and that actors are endlessly fascinating and lovably mad. You must take it as given that Capra would want two near-septuagenarians to play Petruchio and Katharina in a movie version of The Taming of the Shrew and that, at the crucial moment, George would get so rip-roaringly drunk that he would not know whether he was appearing in Private Lives or Cyrano de Bergerac. Then there's the couple's daughter, Roz, whose fiance Howard (Cameron Blakely) is a weatherman who wanders around dressed up as General Paton, and whom the Bensons mistake for Capra.
Ludwig's sentimental script and Ray Cooney's production - both excruciatingly laboured and wearisomely frenetic - do nothing to persuade you that live theatre is not a dying art form, at least in this corner of the West End. Some people talk of thrilling nights in the theatre in terms of Viagra. This is pure cornball laced with Mogadon.
Perhaps there is some irony in the fact that Ludwig's play should be used as a vehicle for Collins and Langella. Its heavy-handed message is that old thespians should know when it's time to stop playing Romeo and Juliet and hand over to the next generation. You have to admire Collins's determination to grow old disgracefully, and her refusal to act her age, but here she barely bothers to act at all, letting her famous legs do all the work. No matter, because Langella acts quite enough for the two of them. Strictly for those whose idea of theatre is Hello! magazine with dialogue.
· Until January 12. Box office: 020-7369 1722.
