What is it about Bridlington hotels? They seem to have taken over from south London squats as the fashionable setting for plays. This jaunty three-hander by Alison Watt provides an hotelier's jaundiced view of a Bridlington B&B.
Watt has written for EastEnders and Crossroads, and it shows: she provides more plotlines than you can shake a stick at. We not only see Jo, who runs Brid's Hotel Mama, coping with her feckless mum and pregnant daughter. We also get endless subplots about Jo's uncertain origins, takeover threats to the hotel and even some nonsense about money-laundering Russian mafia arriving at the Yorkshire seaside.
The real strength of Watt's play lies in its backstairs portrait of the horrors of English hotel life. You get to learn about the financial insecurity, the blocked toilets after a baked-bean breakfast and even the over-zealous fire-officer who dubs each tassel "a time-bomb of combustibility". Most hotel plays are about the guests. This one, like Fawlty Towers, is about the hosts, and it gets a lot of comedy out of the way private dramas erupt in public places - climaxing in a pot-throwing war with a rival hotel during the Bridlington in Bloom competition.
The charm of the piece lies also in the fact that three actresses play multiple roles. Samantha Cooper is striking as a farting elder and a predatory fire-officer as well as the owner's recalcitrant daughter. Belinda Lazenby as the harassed hotelier and Annie Sawle as her self-obsessed mum also do good work in Nick Lane's hectic production, which seems to be covering the whole country between now and mid-May. Never having seen Hull Truck in situ before, I was also struck by the buzzy spirit the theatre gives off, which it hopes to recapture in its projected new £13m home. But Watt's play left me puzzling one question. Since, as one of her characters says, "no bugger's in small-hotel game for money", what madness is it that drives people into running a seaside B&B? Could it be hatred of the hapless guests?
· Until February 14. Box office: 01482 323638.
