When Spider (Charlie Allen) turns up at the local dime store carrying a dead golden eagle, which he claims committed suicide on his windscreen, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot. With the sale of the protected birds highly regulated, he’s convinced that all he needs is a little help from Gene (Hamish Clark) to sell the eagle – which is of particular spiritual significance to Native Americans – on the black market.
But Spider’s a fool. Lullaby (Andrew St Clair-James), the ex-boxer who works in the store, is prone to quoting from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to remind him that he doesn’t have an eagle so much as an albatross.
Actually, Simon David Eden’s comedy turns out to be a bit of a wild goose chase. It is heavy on plot and often floridly written but short on laughs (until the second, far perkier half). It comes across as a pastiche of a Tracy Letts drama. There’s way too much cryptic banter and not enough character development; it’s hard to care about anybody, or believe that Gene and Lullaby would even give the obnoxious Spider the time of day.
Eden designs and directs his own play with pleasing simplicity, and Clark is watchable as Gene, a man with his own problems. But despite all the similes and metaphors, it has nothing pressing to say about contemporary America, and isn’t so entertaining that you’d fail to notice.
- At the Park theatre, London, until 4 February. Box office: 020-7870 6876.
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