As someone whose musical education ended abruptly at the age of eight when my music teacher announced I would be allowed to play the recorder in the end-of-term concert with everyone else on condition that I didn't actually blow, Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt's autobiographical two-hander opens a window on another world.
It is a world of Grade 8 piano exams, pushy parents, endless practice in dark rooms on sunny days and the dreadful realisation after years of dedication and sacrifice that you're never going to make it as a concert pianist. Not even as a member of an orchestra. The most you can hope for is to be the best player in the neighbourhood.
The crazy way Dykstra and Greenblatt deliver Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and their quick-fingered brilliance with impossibly difficult Chopin make you realise that this is no mean achievement. But while this 90 minutes has obvious appeal to those who've had a musical education or whose offspring are in the process of mastering Chopsticks, its wider appeal is less apparent. I have to say I was pretty much indifferent to the whole thing.
It has the feel of a performance that's been fashioned out of a party piece and merely extended. The musical interludes are definitely Grade 8 or above, but the verbal jokes are all distinctly Grade 1.
Dykstra and Greenblatt effortlessly bring music to your ears, but these guys are in desperate need of a writer who could give shape, wit and feeling to these vignettes about precocious poppets, professionally jealous teachers (who always imply that your last piano teacher was a charlatan), and parents obsessed with their children's success.
At the moment this is merely a well-bred divertissement for well-bred theatre-goers before they have their dinner. But two quite brutal scenes, where the aspiring young musicians are told that they just don't have what it takes, suggest that this could have been something much more interesting.
Runs until April. Box office: 0171 369 1731.
