It's billed as a black comedy but Richard Bean's latest drama (since his epic and controversial England People Very Nice at the National) plays more like a try-out for a TV sitcom - at least in the first half. Post-interval, it morphs into an old-fashioned theatre-in-education-style show, transforming the wacky, weird and promising situations of the set-up into a plodding line-up of "issues" - unemployment, drugs, the NHS, war, inner-city regeneration, marital infidelity, biological clocks - crammed into a plot that is simultaneously simplistic and complicated.
This is a shame, because the initial, typically Truck, idea is fun: underdogs battle against the odds for pub-quiz trophy. Bean's script, at the outset, is silly, witty and lively and offers characters rich in both humour and humanity. An unemployed former soldier, Lee, newly returned from Afghanistan, organises his teammates with military precision. His goal? To beat the teachers' team: they said he was thick, but he'll show 'em! His teammates? His dad, a retired docker who, to dull the pain of MS, smokes industrial quantities of dope (a touching David Hargreaves); Woody, a would-be stand-up comic and full-time drug-dealer with a cake-shop cover business (a laconic Adrian Hood); and out-of-towner Melissa (a clever-but-sexy Esther Hall), working for regeneration agency Hull Advance.
It is a great starter mix that is both shaken and stirred by Sarah Parks's brilliantly deadpan pub-landlady-cum-quiz setter - Lily Tomlin crossed with Elsie Tanner singing like Patsy Cline. But then the quiz tournament is relegated to the background for a brutal, drug-based story. The characters are not allowed to develop. Instead, they are manipulated by a heavy-handed dramaturgy that forces them into confrontations - plotted like points on a graph with no regard for emotional truth - that kill the comedy and reduce Marc Bolton's edgy Lee to a social-commentary machine. The gap between what is credible and what convincing grows disappointingly wider and Gareth Tudor Price's direction fails to bridge it.
