Alan Plater is not the first dramatist to spot a parallel between the disintegration of twice-nightly variety and the British empire. But, while his beguiling new play does not match the mesmerising rhetoric of John Osborne's The Entertainer, it is far better plotted and just as socially accurate.
The play is set in a shabby dressing room in an ailing provincial theatre in 1957. There is a pervasive smell of fish, because the recent occupants were Admiral Nelson and his performing seals. But the current residents, the all-white Pedro Gonzales and his Caribbean Rhythm, are put off by something more than the pong. Comprising a veteran show-business couple, an embittered leftie, a column- dodging percussionist and a young Glaswegian pianist, they are in crisis because the lead vocalist has absconded with a pair of nude contortionists. What gives them a shock, however, is when the replacement turns out to be a real Jamaican.
The perfect format allows Plater to link the cynicism of dwindling variety theatre with that of 1950s Britain. The couple's adoption of calypso songs, and even the token blacking-up by their musicians, says a lot about British attitudes to race and the supposed exoticism of other cultures.
Television is also rightly seen as a potent threat and a commercial opportunity. While the displaced veterans dream up a grisly panel game called Spot the Wife, the disillusioned double-bass player wanly remarks that "we have to face the fact that television has replaced entertainment".
The one weak point in Plater's linking of variety and society is that the death of music hall was sad, while the loss of empire was inevitable and beneficial. But, through Jamaican Joe, who has adroitly turned himself from bus conductor into skilled performer, Plater suggests a country on the cusp of profound change. John Dankworth's music captures beautifully the odd mix of nostalgia, patriotism and cultural appropriation that characterised the period. And John Doyle's lively production contains spot-on performances from Paul Greenwood and Susan Jane Tanner as the frayed variety veterans, Jim Bywater as a wartime radical shrouded in despair and Darren Saul as the invincibly optimistic Jamaican. It's a highly enjoyable, richly ambivalent play that loves the world it mocks.
· Until August 30. Box office: 01635 46044.
