In Edinburgh last year, Laura Solon's delightful comic play Rabbit-Faced Story Soup cried out to be developed beyond its 50-minute time slot. Its UK tour provides that opportunity, but Solon has yet fully to capitalise. A superfluous preface has been added and the story's dramatic deficiencies, easy to overlook on first viewing, stand exposed. And yet, at the evening's heart, Solon's prodigious character-comedy talent is intact in this dotty publishing industry picaresque.
Solon admits that the first act has been added to fulfil venues' interval requirements. It shows. Her opening salvos are tentative; what follows – an introduction to her dramatis personae – is jolly but unnecessary. Far better when those characters take centre stage: Didier Auberge, a self-infatuated Frenchman whose masterpiece dispensed with words altogether; Sir Michael Black, a former home secretary who vowed to be "tough on the meaning of crime", and Carol Price, whose children's book about musical mice is given an embittered sequel after her divorce.
Solon's ear for character is impressive. Familiar types – the patrician proprietor, the saucy secretary – are reborn in eccentric shapes and sizes. There are zinging one-liners, most often from one-woman demean machine Marcie Blitzer, a literary agent whose conversation leaves bruises. And, if she's uneasy behind a microphone, Solon is in command when let loose on her characters. It's a shame that the story remains just a peg on which to hang these rather than a mystery in its own right. Despite its flaws, the show shimmers with idiosyncratic personality, and honours the first rule of book-trade comedies: publish, and be damned funny.
