Rough guide to love and friendship

One longs for a dash of something spicier in A Perfect Ganesh, Terrence McNally's 10-year old, American-style A Passage to India. Three times Tony award-winner (Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Master Class and Love! Valour! Compassion!), McNally tends to the broad brush stroke, though there are moments, even in this sentimentalised view of India, when his touch is surprisingly deft.

All the same, A Perfect Ganesh is a strange piece to find in Watford, with its two middle-aged Connecticut wives embroiled in a soul-searching odyssey (each has lost a son, one through gaybashing, another run over) and encounters with Ganesh, the jovial elephant-headed god of wisdom and good fortune.

It's a sprawling, leggy adolescent of a play that doesn't know when to discipline itself; that, like a travelogue, tortuously insists on visiting every tourist site along the way. McNally can't quite make up his mind whether he's writing a satire (on the ubiquitous female American tourist), a wrist-slapper (about racism and homophobia) or a tender guide to the exorcism of guilt and the transmutations of love and friendship.

Tim Luscombe's delightful production (designer Steven Yull achieves wonders with simple arrangements of arches, trellises and boxes) could hardly be better served. It is hard to imagine the enthusiastic Katherine Brynne ("Kitty") being more perfectly expressed than in the pint-sized figure of Sandra Dickinson. Endlessly mobile, boundlessly sincere, she is matched by Lolly Susi's strained, uptight Margaret Civil, a woman whose whole physical demeanour reflects repression. Also by Rohan Siva, charismatic as the benevolent and busy Ganesh, and Andres Williams (recently Benjamin in The Graduate), dizzyingly versatile in a whole gallery of varied characters.

"We travel, but we don't go anywhere," observes Kitty sadly at one point. At its best, A Perfect Ganesh shows that we do advance, but in the tiniest shifts, where we least expect them.

A Perfect Ganesh