Lacklustre...

This week I reviewed Bolt Production’s Lusting After Pipino’s Wife at London's Tabard Theatre for The Stage newspaper:

Unfortunately this play fails to deliver what it says on the tin: “a bitterly sharp, caustic comedy set on the urban battlefront of the war of the sexes.”

Instead the audience are faced with a distinctly unsharp script, with unconvincing verbal exchanges. No battle of the sexes properly ensues - just babyish gripes.

The premise is quite simple - two pairs of friends trying to figure out love and life. Two of them get it together, while the other two try and put them off due to their own insecurities.

It’s a difficult one to call as a lot of the fault needs to be attributed to the play’s author, Sam Henry Kass. Actors can only work with the words they have been handed, and this is a play where the dialogue is totally contrived and characters are more caricatures than three-dimensional people.

However, inspired directing and skilled acting will always help a poor script improve in the eyes of an audience. Unfortunately again though, the actors move clumsily around the stage and are poorly positioned when exchanging dialogue. There was too much gesticulation and not enough pauses to allow any reality to sink in.

Even the mores sensitive lines are lost in the actors’ rushed monologues. You can see the thinking behind the characterisation, but it just doesn’t come through.

Small gestures aren’t small enough, and large ones are too much. But on the whole you know these actors are better than the script selected for them.