Whole industries dedicated to behind the scenes gossip have evolved to serve what seems to be the public’s insatiable appetite for sniffing the dirty linen of their favourite celebrities’ off-screen antics. To be charitable, if it is true that ‘There’s nowt as queer as folk’, then it is certainly the case that there is nothing as interesting as other people. Added to which (and this may be a peculiarly British trait) there is nothing quite as satisfying as watching the exalted ones wobble and topple from their pedestals.

So to the premise of the play: two actors in a film location trailer, one slightly pompous and on the wagon, the other bitter and a practicing lush. The former, Hugh Delavois (Nigel Planer) a veteran and leading artist of all seven of the sci-fi film franchise, ‘Vulcan’, the latter, Gary Savage (Adrian Edmondson) an embittered chum from drama school days with a career on the slide and now reduced to playing a minor super-hero with a handful of lines whilst costumed to look like a startled, cooked lobster.

It all sounds like the recipe for a promising, if conventional, bout of verbal fisticuffs. There are lots of bitchy references to contemporary (successful) actors and plentiful name dropping of the sort familiar to anyone in ‘the biz’. Childish bickering about the relative size of parts and some quips about political correctness and changing attitudes to sexual ‘banter’ round out the first act.

In no small danger of stealing the show is the ‘main artists’ runner’, Leela Vitoli (Lois Chimimba), peart and business-like, who, whilst fending off some sad and somewhat grubby advances, has the job of getting the actors on set in time, but more importantly keeping their festering rivalries from fizzing over into the tight production schedule. Some way into the second act it is revealed that both actors are ex-paramours of her mother at which point each fancy themselves as her (to date unknown) father.

Some comic drama has been bolted on by locating the trailer atop an active volcano in Iceland. This may have been meant as a metaphor for something or other but if so I have to confess at having failed to make the connection. At one point Simon Higlett’s trailer interior set shudders and heaves and we learn that the bridge connecting the unit base with the set has collapsed cutting off the actors – on the active volcano – from the set and safety.

The first act is slow and overlong by at least half an hour and the mystery to me is why three of the most perspicacious producers operating at the moment have failed to get a handle on the shows weaknesses.

Messrs Planer and Edmondson are well within their comfort zone with these characters and thus turn in good performances with plenty of witty lines to raise the laughs. Fans of the two will probably not be disappointed.

★★★☆☆   Graham Wyles   16^th October 2018