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There’s really not much to say about this brief three-hander, which is being staged in a tiny, 18-seat room below legendary Soho pâtisserie Maison Bertaux.
The concept behind writer-director Simon Mawdsley’s play – what if the two driving forces behind the legendary Stones had jacked in the music and got proper jobs instead? – is great, so it’s a shame it doesn’t translate into a particularly engaging piece of theatre.
Over the course of 45 minutes, a pair of septuagenerian men – one dressed in a leather jacket, the other a sharp pinstripe suit – resume a relationship that ended in a puff of abandoned ambition 50 years earlier. They drink tea and have heated arguments about this and that, exactly like two old pals who haven’t seen each other for half a century wouldn’t.
Regular interjections from a pixie-haircutted waitress bring flashes of life, her youth triggering sigh-laden recounts of the good old days and grumbling about how shit it is being old, but it’s not enough to stop the whole thing feeling like an over-stretched sketch.