Kissing Sid James

'Kissing Sid James’ is not your typical romance. It tracks the attempts of geeky stationery ‘sales executive’ Eddie to woo casino-host Crystal by whisking her away to a tacky English seaside spot. The petulant Crystal, (a confident Charlotte McKinney), makes some eye-opening demands of inexperienced Eddie. He meets them with limited success and frequent squirming from the audience. But he’s in over his head, and comic disaster is the only way this play can go.

Amid the suffocating chintz and ruffles of a seedy hotel bedroom, writer Robert Farquhar mercilessly dissects every awkward detail of early intimacy. At times, the script is well-observed, and laugh-out-loud funny – Eddie’s enactment of Crystal’s Sean Connery fantasy is memorable.

But on the whole the production is too frenetic to give space for anything but farce. The concluding scenes try to develop more nuanced ideas of loneliness. But they are lost in the repetitious babble of over-acted one-liners. The stock characters and lack of discernable climax are unsatisfying. It’s consistently mildly amusing, but the production punts for easy laughs rather than imaginative flair.