Beauty is a tame beast

It is never a good sign if a show's high point occurs when the performers are offstage. But such is the case with this erratic musical revue starring Katy Darby and Dave Key-Pugh. Their finest three minutes is easily the shoestring DIY video for Gimme An 80s Movie, which neatly sends up celluloid classics from Rocky IV to Rambo, re-enacting their worst mulletheaded excesses.

This well-aimed parody is the kind of thing the Not The Nine O'Clock News team did so well two decades ago. Shooting-fish-in-a-barrel satire perhaps, but effective. By contrast, the bulk of Darby and Key-Pugh's material is more original but less punchy. She plays the moody diva, with more boas than a snake farm, while he plays the sexually frustrated piano geek.

Darby has a wicked smirk accompanied by some mezzosoprano flourishes and Key-Pugh boasts the kinky jollity of a young Stephen Fry. But their pastiches are lyrically cumbersome and stylistically all over the shop, ranging from jaunty blues to pallid ballads. Numbers such as Serious Song, lampooning rock-star consciences, are vaguely waspish but without sting.

In a cabaret venue this would stand a chance, but in a theatre it never really sparks. Darby's Sunset Boulevardish quip "I'm still big, it's the audience that got small" is dangerously close to the bone when you can virtually count the paying punters on the fingers of a mitten. Another hair-brained 80s movie sprang to mind during this torpid hour. Flatliners.

Until 13 March. Information: 020 7793 9193.

Beauty And The Bitch