Poor crack of the wit

Anyone searching for theatrical wit should steer clear of this slightly amusing farcical comedy by the 1930s Moss Hart and George Kaufman partnership. These American authors specialised in the crack that is fiercely derisive rather than wise. The play's chief maker of cracks Sheridan Whiteside is an impossibly famous critic, radio personality and lecturer. But all he reveals is a talent to abuse and a feast of important friends. Not so much a raft as a cruise liner of famous names are scattered around like confetti rather than dropped.

The play seems an oddly trivial, unexciting choice for Steppenwolf, the admired Chicago company which specialises in new writing, to put before English audiences in the Barbican's first International Theatre season.

As a demonstration of the company's famed ensemble it cuts little ice. American stage actors have been and are hugely admired over here. So it's not mere theatrical chauvinism to suggest the company's gross, expansive style of signalling comedy lacks Anglo-Saxon subtlety.

Moustachioed John Mahoney, with grey beard and padding, plays the monomanic Whiteside on about two notes of gruff querulousness, which soon causes repetitive strain boredom.

This character rains down insults from a great height, or at least from a wheelchair in the home of the Stanley family in Ohio where he's accidentally and unrealistically confined by a fractured limb. The authors wring a few drops of humour from the displays of Sheridan's grand selfishness when he virtually exiles the insulted family from their home, commandeers the telephone and receives sympathising friends. The slightly ironic plot-line depends on the fact that Whiteside encourages the Stanley's grown up son and daughter to escape from their regimented lives.

But when his secretary Maggie falls in love with a local journalist, Sheridan plots to prevent her from finding freedom and happiness.

This farcical and nasty scheme of his involves Ross Lehman as a fairly Noel Cowardish visitor and Shannon Cochran, broad rather than funny, as a vampish actress with a passion for social climbing. Harriet Harris's brisk, emotionally battered secretary is the one truly successful performance in James Burrows's comically unfocused production which makes little of the welcome flashes of surreal eccentricity.

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The Man Who Came to Dinner