Good farce can make your stomach ache, with laughter and with apprehension at what the next moment will bring. Under the Doctor is not good. Most of the fault lies with Peter Tilbury, whose laboured, repetitive writing struggles to raise even a chuckle. But he's not helped by Fiona Laird's plodding production, nor by the hammy performances. This is precisely the sort of excruciating dud that gives farce a bad name.
The format is grindingly familiar. Dr Moulineaux comes home from an all-night session with his mistress to find his wife returned home from holiday. He spends the rest of the morning trying to allay her suspicions, but with every lie he stacks up he uncovers a deception that threatens to send his precarious structure tumbling. Tilbury is fine on intricate plotting - the details are the problem. There are four uses of the phrase "Can't pull the wool over your eyes"; the dismal double entendre "Did you give her one?" crops up; and rather than write real jokes, Tilbury has relied on swearing for laughs. In a weak attempt to discomfort what he appears to thinks of as his deeply conservative and moral audience, he pokes at them with cheap provocations: "All I want," whines the doctor, "is a quiet life; a happy marriage and a bit on the side."
With the profanities, the sex scenes and the murder at the end, Tilbury seeks to subvert the genre, to transform farce into modern black comedy. But he only succeeds in making his play's setting, Paris 1912, even more irrelevant, and in creating the sort of feebly risque drama of the libido run riot (or, as Tilbury puts it in his lofty subtitle, of The Tyranny of Testosterone) that is more usually seen on Channel 5.
It's hard to imagine how this could have been saved in production. Laird doesn't find any solutions; for all the activity, the constant round of entrances and exits, her production drags painfully, and there are yawning gaps where nothing happens. Peter Davison steams and flaps as the doctor, Anton Rodgers maintains an air of lugubrious impassivity as his servant Etienne, but neither provides the kind of star turn that could make this watchable. Major surgery would be pointless: this is one play that should be quickly put out of its misery.
Until May 13. Box office: 020-7369 1731.
