Get us in your inbox

Search

Drowning on Dry Land

Advertising

Time Out says

When you write as many plays as Alan Ayckbourn, they’re not all going to be great. ‘Drowning on Dry Land’ is sometimes entertaining, but says nothing you haven’t heard before about celebrity culture.

Its hapless antihero is Charlie Conrad (Christopher Coghill), a quiz show loser lionised for his talentlessness. But fame is a fickle mistress, and a public indiscretion at his son’s birthday party dims the lights on Charlie’s moment in the sun.

This is a curious confection that plays like a first draft. The dialogue can be creaky – or at least, the actors sometimes struggle to make it sing. His points about the corrosive effect of celebrity (as John Updike said, it’s ‘a mask that eats into the face’) are speechified, not dramatised. And there’s a clunky symbol centre-stage, a tower whose pinnacle can never be reached, no matter how many steps it seems you’ve climbed. Geddit?

The show’s highlight is a stand-alone middle act that swaps celebrity satire for absurd courtroom drama. In the role of louche lawyer Hugo, here to interrogate the sexuality of a transvestite clown (don’t ask), Mark Farrelly steals the show, all braying public-school cadences and smooth self-love. Les Dennis runs him close, as Charlie’s agent, and Siobhan Hewlett is effective as a muckraking interviewer likewise brought low by the wheel of celeb fortune.

Details

Address:
Price:
£20, concs £15
Advertising
You may also like
You may also like