Holy Terror bares all

Those of us haunted by ever-raw memories of Simon Callow stripping down to his bare essentials on stage and film were gripped by fear of a fresh exposure to his flesh last night.

As the publishing tycoon Mark Melon, in Simon Gray's unbelievably dull and juvenile comedy of social manners, Callow swoops upon his tall, sexy secretary (Lydia Fox) and begins to undress the girl while rewarding her with strategically placed kisses.

While he bends to conquer, Callow sheds his trousers, allowing for a gratuitous view of big thighs and buttocks that at his age might be wisely left unseen. Fortunately, though, The Holy Terror turns out to offer Callow the chance of a cerebral striptease rather than a literal one.

Premiered on Radio 3 in 1989, The Holy Terror is an inept rewrite of Gray's West End success with Alan Bates, Melon. It desultorily attempts to portray a publisher gripped in middle-age by paranoia and hypomania before succumbing to a nervous breakdown.

Melon's deluded belief that his wife Kate is romancing his best friend, Rupert, unbelievably precipitates his collapse and then helps drive the pair into each other's adulterous arms: how glibly ironic.

Callow, who briefly falls writhing on the ground with characteristic enthusiasm, even abandons his usual technique of acting hyper-theatrical, to sink touchingly into tearful, childlike desolation and vulnerability.

Gray's cursory, incoherent account of the breakdown, followed by the brief appearance of two caricature shrinks, suggests he is not interested in such serious matters and only introduces them for want of other ideas.

Gray tells us in an introduction that the The Holy Terror was written during "a drunk period". Laurence Boswell's uncertain production duly lurches around, gazing at us with bleary-eyed, hung-over confusion.

The play takes the form of Melon's ramble through his life-story, as told and intermittently dramatised for the benefit of the Cheltenham Women's Institute.

The tone is reactionary, sneering, witless mockery at the expense of would-be writers Melon exploits after he takes over a literary publishing house - Es Devlin offers a book-filled set, the walls papered with editor's notations - from a deaf, elderly bumbler played by Robin Soans.