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Duchess, London
Tim Firth is clearly not a man to let a bad idea go to waste. Twenty years ago he wrote a one-act play, Man of Letters, about an encounter between age and youth on a Batley rooftop. This is apparently his second attempt to turn it into a full-length play, but it remains a desperately slight, whimsical piece that tries to get by on a few good jokes.
When we first meet Frank and Alan, the former is a veteran installer of illuminated signs and the latter a gauche young assistant on work experience. Three years later the unemployed Frank has become a humble jobseeker, while Alan has risen to the giddy heights of a trainee assistant manager in an electrical superstore. The second, livelier act allows Firth the chance to take a few accurate potshots at the corruption of language in the retail trade.
"A customer," Alan sagely informs Frank, "brings only custom, but a client brings commitment." But Firth never really explains why a potential, seemingly gifted artist like Alan should settle for life as a salesman, and spells out all too clearly his point that the younger man is gradually turning into a replica of the older one.
The piece depends heavily on the charm of its performers.
Matthew Kelly does a good job in showing Frank's shift from being a bossy supervisor, secretly nursing ambitions to be a writer of spy thrillers, into a supplicant for work.
Gerard Kearns, making his West End debut after playing in Shameless, also captures Alan's initial perkiness and subsequent descent into a peddler of management-speak. But, although the two actors and director Peter Wilson put as much flesh on the piece as they can, I find the play's tone of feelgood sentimentality grating.
At a time of increasing unemployment amongst both young and old, there seems to me little room for a bland comedy that argues we should all sit back, accept life's disappointments, and live off our private dreams.
