Main House: Been So Long

Camden gets a serenade in soul music as well as neon prose in this funk/reggae musical from its resident playwright Che Walker and his long-time collaborator, composer Arthur Darvill. Premiered as a straight play at the Royal Court in 1998, Walker's first musical here boasts fireworks from the bolshy 5-strong cast (whom he directs) and Darvill's smoochily textured score, which leaves plenty of room for comic contrasts and vocal exhibitionism. But it's a bit too much like a Saturday night out on Inverness Street: teeming with talent and great riffs on lust and friendship, but in frequent danger of losing the plot. This concerns four lovelorn boozers in an empty bar, who scrap and get it on under the sympathetic eye of bar-tender Barney (Omar Lyefook). Harry Hepple's tracksuited turn as Gil, who shrugs his stuff in a Mike Skinner-style loser-rap, is hilarious. But the relationship that comes closest to feeling real in this violent and sentimental quartet is the one between Simone and her man-eating best pal Yvonne (Naana Agyei-Ampadu), who treats every one of her speeches and songs like it was a shrieking, humming multiple orgasm. Walker's language, switching between street and baroque, can seem like overkill when recapped smoothly in Darvill's songs, and five don't make enough of a crowd to fill Dick Bird's big glitzy, mirrored set. This might have been more relaxed and real performed in a bar in the neighbourhood it hymns so outrageously.