Watch any two drummers together and you may as well be watching a couple of duellists slugging it out. That sense of competition is apparent in Arne Sierens' two-hander, in which Raymond answers a newspaper advert looking for a drummer to give lessons to a teenage boy. The boy turns out to be the son of Paola, who once lived the rock'n'roll life with Ray's half-brother, Serge. Serge was the drummer in a band who were once on the verge of hitting the big time.
Or were they? Rock'n'roll is mythology in the making, and Sierens seems as much interested here in the tendency of us all to create a story of our lives that we want to believe. That involves forgetting as well as remembering. Raymond claims he is about to join a band, but he may be a waster with paedophilic tendencies, while Paola may or may not have shopped Serge to the police. Is Paola's teenage son the tearaway she paints him to be, or, like the absent Serge, is he, too, part of a mythology in the making? There is a question in every drum-beat that punctuates the action from offstage.
There are dozens of sizzling new plays deserving of a revival, but this isn't one of them - certainly not in a production that fails to find the rhythmic riffs in Sierens' jump-cut dialogue. It never makes you believe Paola lived a wild and wasted life, or appreciate the mix of hero-worship mingled with jealousy that drives Raymond. Here, they are just two sad losers, and Sierens' play a misguided, middle-aged romantic tribute to rock'n'roll culture.
