In retrospect, the Menier’s first significant success set the tone for much of the non-musical side of its fare over the subsequent decade: deft, accomplished and not terribly weighty. Now Becky Mode and Mark Setlock’s solo show has been revived for the venue’s tenth anniversary, and what has changed changed is principally the world outside.
    
The figure of the between-proper-jobs actor taking phone calls to bring in a few bucks has been a cliché for a while. In this case, Sam is staffing the reservations line of a swanky New York restaurant which is usually booked out, or “fully committed” as the house euphemism has it. Sam is overworked, underpaid and abused by an arrogant chef on the other end of a hotline who sadistically bullies him even as far as cleaning up a toilet malfunction upstairs. This is where a decade has brought its changes: amid the explosion of unpaid internships and zero-hours work contracts, it can be harder to laugh at privations like these, even when their portrayal is frothily intended. We may have become more callous ourselves as well: on the press night, the biggest and most closely clustered laughs came for repeated descriptions of a woman as ugly.
    
Despite these harshnesses, though, the basic work remains entertaining, and this revival does it justice. It’s the kind of cast-of-thousands solo piece where the performer has no time to be ostentatious about how many different characters they can do: Sam is supposed to answer the phone before the third ring, so there are only a few seconds to sketch in the person on the other end. Several of them recur, though, such as the domineering chef and Naomi Campbell’s braying Aussie assistant with a succession of excessive demands. Setlock, who performed the play in 2004, now directs television comedian Kevin Bishop as Sam (and everyone else). Bishop makes the transitions between characters bigger than I remember Setlock doing, but still not so big as to constitute showing-off; he gives such a high-octane performance that he even shaves the running time, now standing at a little over 70 minutes. This revival strikes me as principally an act of private nostalgia on the Menier’s part, but happily not so private that it leaves us out of the jollies.
    
Written for the Financial Times.