Comedy farce

I have scoured my mind, as well as my black book of painful, theatrical memories, in an effort to recall a Royal Court play as boring and vacuous, as unfunny and pointless as this grey farce that was inflicted upon us on Friday night. But I have failed to come up with anything. The Lying Kind is the last straw. Author Anthony Neilson, has made a deserved name for himself as the agent provocateur of contemporary theatre. He brings us face to face with dark desires and secrets that are normally left concealed. Now he has had a shot at farce and missed.

The Lying Kind, in which two policeman are deputed to tell elderly parents that their daughter has been killed in a road accident, lacks a moral framework or a moral point to give the play backbone. Fear and panic, those dynamic engines of farce, are here artificially cranked into action and then shuddering to a halt. Joe Orton used bad taste as a weapon in the service of enlightenment. He wrote savage, farcical comedies that wittily exposed hypocrisies and immoralities at the heart of England. British pillars of authority were demolished and revealed as corrupt. Neilson, by contrast, succumbs to mild flashes of bad taste, but to no purpose: when the senile mother (Sheila Burrell) flashes her knickers or loses her senses you just feel embarrassed for Neilson.

Constables Blunt and Gobbel, afflicted by fear and embarrassment at the prospect of breaking terrible news, resemble no police stereotype. And when they are unbelievably terrorised and physically abused outside the house by Alison Newman, miscast as Gronya, the leader of Parents against Paedophile Scum, the farce is yanked further into absurdity's realm. Both Thomas Fisher's silly, dithering Gobbel and Darrell D'Silva's more masterful, blustering Blunt go into frantic, theatrical overdrive from the start, as if realising the dreary repetitiveness of their roles.

After the elderly couple, Garson and Balthasar, react without any symptoms of overwhelming sorrow to news of their bereavement, Neilson starts playing laborious games of mistaken identity and false impressions. An unconscious vicar in a closet with underwear that raises eyebrows, a dead dog and a girl hidden in a chest serve as hopelessly contrived plot-devices to inspire the policemen to unjustified panic. Neilson directs a heavy-handed cast among whom only Patrick Godfrey's becalmed Balthasar offers a hint of amusement.

Closes 11 January. Box office: 020 7565 5000.

The Lying Kind