Remember revue? A witty collection of songs and sketches on diverse themes. I kept wanly recalling its heyday while watching this dismal off-Broadway import: it apes the revue-form while sticking, with a hermetic blandness, to the single subject of dating, mating and sexually relating. A more succinct title than the cutesy one on offer might be Bed and Bored.
Written by Joe Dipietro, with music by Jimmy Roberts, the show deploys two men and two women to explore the hazards of heterosexual life. It begins with a mildly promising item in which a busy-busy couple decide to compress the whole cycle of loving and leaving into a single brief encounter. But, thereafter, each sketch offers a bald statement of the obvious: that men often bore their dates to tears, that loving couples can have different sexual rhythms, that the price of marital security is domestic monotony, that young marrieds lapse into infuriating infantile baby-talk.
The territory itself is not exactly virgin: indeed, Sondheim's Company, nearly 30 years ago, precisely nailed the eternal conflict between the dignity of solitude and the pangs of sexual and emotional commitment. Even when the show has a half-good idea, such as the notion of making lousy love-making a legal offence, it fails to pursue it to a satiric conclusion.
But what really stifles the show is its total severance of sex and passion from the outside world. It's a deeply American idea that "relationships" somehow exist in an airtight vacuum divorced from money, work, power and politics.
Only at the end does the show move from the general to the particular. In one goodish sketch a desperate, middle-aged divorcee makes a totally candid videogram advertising herself to future partners; in another, a pair of aged funeral-groupies amusingly strike up a last-ditch relationship. But for most of the time one is assaulted by blinding truisms. And, although the quartet in Joel Bishoff's production do a lot of strenuous costume-changing, only Clive Carter makes a strong impression, not least as a looming serial killer terrifying mismatched couples into hasty alliances.
The great mystery is why the show has been so popular in America. I can only assume it's because it's economic to stage, tells people what they already know and deals with the subject of sex without a quiver of eroticism, or even the faintest hint that it may occur between people of the same gender. In short, an evening of safe, prophylactic theatre.
