At the Dice's mercy

The plot of Paul Lucas's absurd comedy and black farce The Dice House seems not so much seriously disturbed as plain crazy and suitable for admission into some mental institution. The action duly moves there in the second scene, when Dr Drabble, who is far from being in his right mind, blackmails his timid young patient, Matthew, to get himself admitted to a very odd therapy centre indeed. In this centre the patients and its deranged director, Dr Ratner, who dresses in a changing variety of women's and schoolgirls' costumes, obsessively give themselves over to Dice therapy. They leave every decision, large and small, to the fall of the dice they obsessively shake.

The play's satirical intention is not just to mock bizarre forms of therapy but seriously to remind us of our obsession with freedom, chance and fate. By refusing to make their own choices the Dice House inmates imagine they are finding freedom when they are, in fact, putting themselves in chains. Unfortunately, though, Lucas's farce refuses to maintain the consistency of its own mad logic, and often indulges in mere opportunistic knock-about fun. The humour lapses too often into good-humoured silliness. And Graeme Messer's rather anaemic production lacks the right farcical velocity and madcap momentum. The two mad shrinks, Jeremy Crutchley's Drabble and Neal Foster's Ratner, although they admirably refuse to play crude and broad, ought be more spirited, more interestingly fanatical and dangerous.

Once in the Dice House, though, there are comic flashes of quite inspired verbal absurdity and visual lunacy: Matthew Noble's Matthew, charged with kidnapping Drabble's wife (Lucy Scott) comes up against mentally disturbed Victor in his stolen policeman's uniform. And Neil Boorman's bemused Smith, attacked by the masked Slow Assassin, finds the shrinks turn blind or mad eyes to his pain. It is an evening of intermittent but unusual fun.

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The Dice House