An overreaching talent

The audience members who arrived 15 minutes late last night must have asked themselves what on earth was happening.

Those of us who had been there since the start of this demanding, fitfully entertaining new drama were, however, wondering exactly the same thing.

In Darwin in Malibu, his 2004 piece at Hampstead, Crispin Whittell had the arch evolutionist frolicking at the seaside in Hawaiian prints.

Here he traps one of the major figures of the 1945 American nuclear programme in an imaginary New Mexico hotel room with Paris Hilton's greatuncle.

And a gumshoe detective. With a frisky 18-year-old virgin hiding in the wardrobe. Not to mention a nun on a trampoline.

A young playwright who is unafraid to move through decades and genres like this is, firstly, to be commended for the scale of his ambition.

With the right nurturing, Whittell's talent will surely blossom beautifully.

At the moment, though, the Bambi legs of Clever Dick - or perhaps that should be Clever-Clever Dick - can't hold the weight of homage.

For Whittell, with his famous and farcically conjoined characters musing philosophically on matters atomic, wants to ape Terry Johnson, Tom Stoppard and, above all, Michael Frayn.

Yet he fails to replicate the sophisticated moral dilemma of Frayn's Hbomb treatise Copenhagen, or ascend to the delirious heights of farce of the likes of Noises Off.

Richard Feynman, the acclaimed physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, takes a wrong turn out of Albuquerque one June night in 1945.