All human life is here in the typing pool: family tensions, missed opportunities, flare-ups, mating dances, and final end-of-a-long-day exhaustion are crammed into little more than an hour. Trouble is, there's no subtlety at all in the compression. Murray Schisgal is ostentatious in assembling his script: oh, look, here comes another major life experience neatly slotted into the dramatic superstructure. This soon becomes draining; the artificiality is exacerbated by acting which is often simply too broad for a 50-seat pub theatre. The overall impression is of a writing and acting exercise rather than a work with an audience in mind.
Written for City Limits magazine.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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