Humour lost in translation

European comedy can be a funny business. And not always because of the laughs. Occasionally, a Continental script will come along and capture the imagination on these shores: Yasmina Reza's Art, for example, La Cage Aux Folles or Le Dîner De Cons.

Other times plays migrate here garlanded with awards we've never heard of, only to beg the question: was something lost in translation?

So it is with Fabrice Roger-Lacan's Members Only, in which two men fall out rather spectacularly and not particularly hilariously, over one man's membership of an exclusive club.

Bernard (Robert Bathurst) and Adrien (Nicolas Tennant) are business partners in some sort of design firm - their office, where the action takes place, is a spartan mix of gadgetry with the room's dimensions artfully written on the walls.

Today is Bernard's 40th but Adrien can't come to the party. But he won't say why. And he won't say why he won't say why until Bernard gets stroppy, whereupon Adrien slowly confesses that it coincides with his monthly meal with
his club, the Hedgehogs, which will kick him out should he miss the meal.

Suddenly Bernard wants to be a Hedgehog (the name of the club is only there for the limited humour in lines like this) and goes wildly off the rails when Adrien refuses to nominate him for membership.

No one would act like this, so the play needs to crank up its farcical elements to work. But there's little farce going on, and not even much comedy.

Marianne Badrichani's production is well-cast: Bathurst has some nice turns of phrase as the snivellingly sensitive Bernard, and Tennant is better as the dishevelled, overgrown child Adrien. But at its core, the play feels underwritten.

Roger-Lacan wants to tackle themes of friendship and belonging, but every time Adrien avoids the issue of what the club is for, it feels like the writer simply hasn't bothered to think up a reason.

Members Only