Frothy frissons on a road to nowhere

There may be the germ of a frail television soap opera struggling for full-blown life in this new Canadian play by George F. Walker. But not much else. Walker has written a sextet of plays, all set in the same motel in suburban Canada and involving the same characters, and if Featuring Loretta is typical of the other five then the project would strike me with all the force of a feather.

The play casts comic light upon young, none-to-great hopers, fired by materialistic ambition and struggling to rescue their lives from the grind of disappointment. But Walker's comic touch is hard-labour, the jokiness imposed rather than integral. The comedy is set in a motel room of flamboyant, orange carpeted hideousness designed with nice touches of satire by Joanna Parker. Here Loretta, an off-duty waitress in a fringed miniskirt, white boots and glitter jacket, is propositioned to put her sex-appeal to fresh use as a porn actress with her discarded lover, Neil Stuke, improvising as the male lead. It's an idea with humorous potential. Con O'Neill as Michael, a bar-booker for topless girls whose disguise as a maker of porn films is soon stripped bare, flashes an effective line in leering opportunism which masks desperation. And the weak-wristed rivalry between Michael and Loretta's wisely rejected lover provokes faint amusement.

Matilda Ziegler as the waitress who believes money is a girl's best friend, looks and sounds the picture of self-confident sex-appeal.

But the play, which is stuffed with too much incident, veers off in so many directions that it arrives nowhere.

The details of pregnant Loretta's past and the troubles of the Russian motel-owner's daughter, not to mention a vanishing corpse and a kidnap achieved by a man using his thumb as a pretend-gun are symptomatic of Fraser's gross comic sensibility. Robin Lefevre's production, on a redesigned stage which ranges the audience on three-sides, tries to energise a play which has more droop than drive.

Featuring Loretta