The History of Pandas Told By a Saxophonist With a Girlfriend in Frankfurt Baron's Court Theatre **
A man and a woman awake in bed, swathed in white linen under bluish light. "Who are you?" the man asks. She spins him a tale of how he seduced her with the reliable male strategy of playing sax and quoting Baudelaire, but he still doesn't remember. This man is the saxophonist. The woman might be his girlfriend - at least, they make a bargain that she will live with him for nine nights - but there are sadly no black-and-white bears bouncing on the bedsprings, and they're miles from Frankfurt.
The story, such as it is, unfolds in a succession of short scenes as the woman (Marella Oppenheim) returns each night. The saxophonist (Martin Ritchie) ignores friends' messages on his answering machine and practices his French verse alone on the bed.
For his birthday, the woman brings a large, covered birdcage, apparently containing an invisible creature that has to be fed every four hours and reproduces instantly on contact with light.
This gently surreal two-hander, by Romanian playwright Metei Visniec, was originally written in French, and would benefit from a Gallic style of light, conversational acting. The laudable enthusiasm of the performers, though, wanders in the wrong direction: Oppenheim finishes nearly every line with a girlish moue and kooky jig of the arms, and Ritchie is good at looking baffled but over eggs his more passionate moments.
One scene, a parable of lovers' communication in which the woman requires him to say "Aaah" through a whole spectrum of meaningful inflections, falls unhappily flat.
Visniec's writing itself is also at fault. The saxophonist is given a long speech about his childhood: his now-dead father planted a fruit tree for each of his siblings, so that now his mother "eats us in secret to compensate for our absence", which is a lovely literary conceit but has no dramatic value.
Other ideas - when the two spy on the lives of their apartment-building neighbours, or when the saxophonist replays a phone message left by the woman that changes on each hearing - are pleasant in themselves but do not knit together into any satisfying dramatic shape.
The play attains a skewed beauty in its final scenes, helped by magically simple set design and lighting, with plashy cymbals and alto saxophone trills dancing in the air. But it would benefit greatly from savage cuts in the first 20 minutes: as it stands, the entertainment-to-length ratio is somewhat inferior to that of its amusing title.
