In the age of instant gratification it is a risk to label a new play “comedy”. If there are no safe laughs in the first fifteen minutes a certain unease — almost worry — builds in the audience and it is a hell of a job to haul it up again. Tim Firth’s play arrives after several incarnations: first a one-acter commissioned by Alan Ayckbourn for Scarborough twenty years ago, morphing into Absolutely Frank, now rebuilt and renamed. So it has had time to grow and Firth, who wrote the hit film Calendar Girls, has a solid record in stage and TV.
But there’s the problem: for all its humour, that film depended less on laughter than on warmth, character and social observation. Firth does all those things rather well: he has a lovely turn of phrase and dry Yorkshire observation in the tradition of Priestley, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. But he’s not a jokesmith and the first act takes far too long to build.
The men of letters are Frank (Matthew Kelly), an old-fashioned technical perfectionist who puts up huge illuminated signs, and the work- experience teenager Alan (Gerard Kearns, a newcomer to the West End), who joins him on a roof. A nice, believable set by Morgan Large has a tattered flag fluttering. Gazing out over the bypass, Frank enthuses about “MT, the princess of all vertical bracketing systems” and lectures the kid on the dignity of work as they struggle with huge letters. “There are two kinds of people, those who get things in order at the depot, and those who end up killing people with a six-foot H”.
Lovely lines, and there is fun to be had with Frank’s ambition, revealed in dictaphone mutterings, to be the new John le Carré. He knows that he has “all the ambition, but absolutely no talent”. Alan, for all his hunched hoodie sullenness, is creative: he composes for his band and designs record sleeves, “anarchic, like a Picasso”.
Something does happen eventually. In the second act, three years later, the roles are reversed, with Alan, uncomfortable as a trainee assistant departmental manager in an electrics chain, giving Frank an induction as salesman (or “client service director”) on a scheme for the older unemployed. Firth’s grasp of motivational nonsense is excellent, with “sale interaction windows” and stupid acronyms such as SPA to enforce Smiling and Personal Attention. The picture of a skilled, old-school operative being fed this rubbish is as poignant as it is funny, so the author embroils them in a denouement of physical comedy to cheer us up. Both players, I should say, are good; Kearns is very promising indeed. They deserve a better play.
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Box office: 0844 5791973; to May 28