★★☆☆☆
On nights when inspiration runs low, a theatre can sometimes resemble a gym, a place where writers and actors come to work on their muscles rather than to tell engaging stories.
Caryl Churchill’s spartan two-hander A Number, which finishes its run at the Old Vic this weekend, falls into that category. So too does this revival of a love triangle by Mike Bartlett first seen at the Royal Court in 2009. The workout analogy extended to the music hammering away before the play started. Thump, thump, thump.
The knowledge that Taron Egerton, who played Elton John in Rocketman, fainted during the first preview added a frisson. Happily, he got through this performance, playing opposite Jonathan Bailey, the Bridgerton star, without any crisis. At the end came the now statutory standing ovation. But what a clumsy effort this is.
In the programme notes, Bartlett congratulates himself on coming up with a study of sexual identity that was ahead of its time. The truth is it seems dated. Had it been written in, say 1969, its portrait of a gay man who tumbles into a physical relationship with a member of the opposite sex might have seemed audacious. Today it feels like old news.
What’s more, the central conceit is about as plausible as the average episode of Bridgerton. Bailey is John, a narcissistic fellow who tells his partner, known in the script as M, that a fling with a woman (otherwise known as W) has left him feeling understandably confused. M, equally understandably, is not amused.
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So what does M do? Naturally, he invites the rival to a dinner with the pair of them and, to raise the stakes, asks his widowed father to come along to lend moral support.
Bartlett’s would-be risqué dialogue often sounds like a clumsy translation from a bad French comedy. (“I don’t want to be crude,” John says of his new love, “but her vagina is amazing.”) In Marianne Elliott’s production, perched on Merle Hensel’s minimalist set, everything is overbright and overemphatic.
Fragments of music provide punctuation between scenes, Egerton and Bailey marking the transitions with cliched slow-motion writhing gestures. Jade Anouka, as W, and Phil Daniels as the crass father can’t do much with such heavy-handed writing. The scene where John and W make love, all the while standing on opposite sides of a revolve, like horny, socially distanced citizens, raised a smile. Otherwise, this was an hour and 45 minutes of tedium.
To June 4, cocktheplay.co.uk
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