Simon Gray has totally revised his moderately successful 1987 play, Melon, without in any way improving it. In fact, he's made it worse by a jarring disjunction between form and content. The subject is mental breakdown, but the style is almost that of intimate revue.
The evening takes the form of a lecture given by a onetime publishing hotshot, Mark Melon, to a Women's Institute: quite why a broken Bloomsbury reed should be on the tea-and-biscuits circuit is never clear. But Melon subjects the ladies to a graphic account of his decline and fall. At first we see him as the aggressive, philandering whizzkid despatching unwanted authors with merciless aplomb. Hyperactivity turns to hysteria, however, symbolised by the baseless conviction that his loving wife is having an affair.
In Melon, jealousy was seen as the cause of madness; here it is a visible symptom. But Gray never explains what it is that actually drives an adrenalin-fuelled publisher over the edge. Gray's Melon literally gives us a lecture on his life; but he is so much the point-scoring protagonist in the first half that it becomes difficult to accept him as the pitiable victim of the second.
Simon Callow also seems grossly miscast as Melon in that his forte is energy and attack rather than vulnerability. He is perfectly plausible as the terror of Bedford Row treating writers as if they were anxious courtiers and employing a friend as an editor "to make sure nothing of his was ever published". But his breakdown seems largely a matter of external effects and his metamorphoses back into the Cheltenham lecturer lack the right silky facility.
Since the other characters are plucked from Melon's memory, it is difficult for them to achieve independent existence. But Robin Soans is adept as an old-style publisher, even if he can do nothing with a shrink who ends each scene with a heavily signalled punchline. Tom Beard also dutifully plays a quartet of fall-guys and Lydia Fox provides the obligatory sex interest as a micro-skirted secretary. The puzzle remains as to why director Laurence Boswell has chosen this particular Gray play. At his best, Gray offers a scorching critique of the English male's emotional detachment; here he fails to get inside the head of his disintegrating hero.
· Until August 21. Box office: 0870 060 6623.
