Just an old banger

It may be titled The Solid Gold Cadillac, but this limp, lame American comedy by Howard Teichmann and George S Kaufman musters no more impact than a clapped-out old banger, which chugs into town when it ought have headed for the scrapyard instead. I was quickly driven to boredom and stranded there.

Patricia Routledge and Roy Hudd look distinctly precarious as they ride this creaky vehicle, whose satirical attack on the avarice of company directors turns out to be about as fierce as a cat's miaow.

The basic idea strikes a seductive, contemporary chord, though not for long, with Miss Routledge as the elderly bit-part actress, Laura Partridge, who comes to the annual meeting of The General Products Corporation of America and courteously asks what justifies the increased remuneration the directors have awarded themselves.

It is a sign of the authors' uncritical attitude to corporate greed that Laura is quickly won over with the offer of a salary as Director of Stock-Holder Relations and ends up morally compromised herself.

From 1920 to 1945 Kaufman wrote a string of amusing, sentimental comedies with collaborators, of whom Moss Hart was the best. He supplied the escapist, unprovocative entertainment New York audiences craved. The Solid Gold Cadillac, however, which he wrote with new co-author Teichmann, dates from 1953 when his health and his talents were in decline. It lacks a coherent narrative line or development.The comic/satiric potential of Laura at Corporation HQ is quickly exhausted, so that Laura is sent off to Washington to lobby Roy Hudd's Senate Lobbyist, on her company's behalf.

Ian Brown's production, using video film and Ruari Murchison's bare, cheap-looking sets, veers between the comic and farcical, as if uncertain which of the play's elements ought be stressed. The craven, crooked directors are too ridiculous to be more than farcical figures.

Mr Hudd, miming with frantic enthusiasm, and looming very large, mounts an almost self-contained one-man show - in a non-American voice, too. Miss Routledge, American accent undeveloped, voice quavering and not quite eccentric or flamboyant enough in behaviour to bolster frail comic opportunities, deftly plays Laura as a kindly, failed actress in search of financial security. Her admirers will be pleased. These two actors, though, in roles that require mutual sympathy, appear located on entirely different wavelengths.

Until 15 January.

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Solid Gold Cadillac