BILL & ESME. To 8 June.

London

BILL & ESME
by Adam Pernak

Chelsea Theatre To 8 June 2002
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 55min One interval

TICKETS 020 7352 1967
Review Timothy Ramsden 15 May

A double-bill which fails to make its point: twice.After a couple of two-handers running 50 and 70 minutes respectively, this is an epic by Chelsea Theatre reckonings. But the main interest in Adam Pernak's writing comes in his programme note. His two short plays merely hint, amid a heap of cliches, at the moral urgency shown there.

The first, slighter piece The Bill Cantor Story scratches a seam often enough mined to greater depth. Bill, an old-style, unhip comic, is about to have his series axed. For all Mike Burns' hopeful amiability, the only surprise is that Bill wasn't mercy-killed as a TV comic, say, 30 years ago. Comedians with his 1950s golf-club attitudes doubtless still make some sort of a living. But this man doesn't even realise the world has moved on.

Yet Pernak seems to want our sympathy for the old trouper, survivor of an extinct tribe. He weakens his case further by teaming Bill with a fading Turner Prize artworld starlet whose desperation for her own TV series should surely mark her down for the same out-tray as Bill. And having Bill's agent apparently hospitalised – clumsily handled in Sarah Esdaile's otherwise anonymous direction – and handing on her business to an unsympathetic younger partner merely overeggs an already cholesterol-clotted plot.

Esme And Louise is more substantial, yet even less credible. In their terraced-house in a drugs-ridden Lancashire town, Esme and her divorced middle-aged son Alan prepare sandwiches and cakes for his daughter Louise. But her boyfriend's a violent dealer and she's implicated in substance abuse. And, as they're all named on end-credits scrolling up the multiple TVs round Matt Atwood's set, Pernak might be under-cutting his high drama as just the stuff of soap-opera. Esme (Maria Charles, a fine actor wasted in this piece) fires a gun in the air to clear off the drugs-dealer. But the evening's been shot in the foot long before this supposedly Thelma & Louisy climax.

Bill/Alan: Mike Burns
Mrs Waters/Esme: Maria Charles
Thom/Steven: Daniel Coonon
Sarah/Louise: Helen Murton

Director: Sarah Esdaile
Designer/Video: Matt Atwood
Lighting: Nastasha Chivers
Sound: Marco Centore

2002-05-16 10:42:04