SPENDING THE PENSION. To 23 February.

London.

SPENDING THE PENSION
by Andrew Neil.

Old Red Lion Theatre 418 St John Street EC1V 4NJ To 223 February 2008.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 5pm.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7837 7816.
www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 February.

Neat scenes don’t coalesce into a dramatic whole.
Well, really. I’ve come across product-placement, but to see a scene in Andrew Neil’s wry look at later-life love in which ex-actress Peggy Logan commends and practises Pilates, then find a Pilates Studio co-producing sets my teeth on edge. Though, despite a Dental Practice also helping out, dentures don’t rate a mention. So unfair, the theatre business.

A little more business wouldn’t come amiss in this piece, which is currently a draft on the way to something quite good. Cultured English Peggy and her foul-mouthed Glaswegian husband of seven years, Wilson, who has no time for aesthetics or religion as life on earth becomes steadily less certain, form a promising odd couple. Their mutual love is evident, occasionally stated, more often shown in their accommodation to each other’s ways.

They dominate the play – and the title. Newlyweds Deidre and Gordon, from Blackburn (the Old Red Lion’s last play was set in Wigan; have Lancashire and the Angel got something going together?), shadow their elders without ever connecting with them, or having the older couple’s solidity as characters. Separately, the couples each visit a church, line-up in a supermarket and attend hospital (though how the virginal Deidre and Gordon come to need a sexually-transmitted diseases clinic is one of the plays, if not life’s, bigger mysteries).

There are good lines, and unbelievable situations. It’s too coincidental the younger pair have just started working for an undertaker, while Gordon’s inability to distinguish church from mosque, even in Jerusalem, hardly inspires confidence. Yet Wilson’s complaints about supermarket checkout queues are funny enough to prevent you wishing he’d think of the obvious answer – splitting their twelve items between them and using the empty “10 Items or Less” queue.

The situations are mostly static, a sense increased by the various banners backing most scenes. There’s delicate humour - and indelicate, Wilson being a fount of comments on physical functions. But the two couples need some kind of reason for being in the same play, and that play needs some action, as well as its dialogue, to develop them. All four actors serve the script well.

Wilson Logan: Andrew Neil.
Peggy Logan: Anna Barry.
Deirdre Charlotte Donnelly.
Gordon: Alexander McConnell.

Designer: Ken McClymont.
Lighting: Frank Usher.
Sound: Martin Fisher.
Music: Adrian Colborne.
Choreographer: Gilbert Vernon.

2008-02-14 10:39:51