Pastiche is a more intricate affair than it looks. If your source material is crass, it’s not enough simply to be crass: you have to somehow find a clever way of being crass. Tipping the wink to the audience doesn’t suffice; that’s like saying, “Yes, this is rubbish, but we know it’s rubbish so that makes it cool.” It doesn’t – it makes you lazy.

Ben Adams (formerly of pop band a1) and Chris Wilkins’ musical winks so often it’s like Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther films. It’s pastiching two areas simultaneously: the 1980s, about which it knows less than it thinks (such as the difference between a beat-box and a boom-box), and the Bronze Age of comic books, about which it knows nothing. No sooner has teenage geek and would-be comic writer/artist Eugene (Liam Forde) remonstrated with his father that comics such as Frank Miller’s Batman series are not kids’ stuff than he’s singing a number namechecking childish figures such as Skeletor.

When Eugene is signed by a rapacious movie producer, the scene moves from Toledo, Ohio to Hollywood, and the pastiche becomes parody of cheap SF movies, as the real evil Lord Hector arrives on Earth to best his twin brother and nemesis Tough Man, whom Eugene had been channelling through dreams... oh, I don’t know. Eugene and his geeky-but-beautiful friend Janey (Laura Baldwin, basically a rock chick in dungarees) end up together, anyway.

The show is co-produced by Warwick Davis, and has thus managed to recruit Mark Hamill to voice a robot (which sounds like C3PO and looks like a kitchen swing-bin) and Brian Blessed to, surprisingly, only half-bellow a couple of narrative links. The recent Weinstein-etc. revelations have evidently led Adams and Wilkins to rethink their material to the extent of, er, nothing at all: Eugene’s fat (and thus, for this show, inherently ridiculous) friend still pretends to be an agent and tries to seduce an actress with a number about “doing the no-pants dance”, and this is supposedly fun rather than wincesome.

The songs themselves are serviceably anthemic, but even experienced director Ian Talbot can’t keep a cast of nearly 20 moving smoothly across a cluttered stage design, and the material overall makes Weird Science look like Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Written for the Financial Times.