Variety lacking spice

The time is 1957, and empires are crumbling all around. Britain's has lost its world standing and the variety shows performed in countless Empire Theatres up and down Britain are being replaced in the country's affection by that new-fangled invention, the television.

This shift in a nation's cultural habits, away from performing seals and towards What's My Line, is a particularly potent dramatic topic, as John Finnemore proved so eloquently with last year's Edinburgh hit, The Straight Man. The normally excellent Alan Plater, however, while working with virtually identical components, disappointingly manages to come up with a piece that lacks both comedy and poignancy.

Pedro Gonzales and His Caribbean Rhythm is the latest incarnation of ageing husbandand-wife double act Mike and Peggy Gorman, and on the basis of their one hit, an excruciating Coronation Calypso, they have been playing twice-nightly variety bills around the country for years, along with the other rag-tag members of their band, none of whom has ever been west of Blackpool. The supposed crisis here is that singer Boy Wonder has gone AWOL, to be replaced by - gasp! - a genuine black singer from Jamaica, but Plater leaves us not caring or even wondering if the show will go on. Instead, his characters drown slowly in their own second-rate - and oddly liberal for this era - dressingroom banter, which is enlivened only by the occasional decent one-liner.

Uniformly mediocre acting does not help to convince us that these are people whose livelihoods are slipping away before their very eyes, nor does a standard of linelearning that is no credit whatsoever to a professional theatre. It is disappointing to see director John Doyle, the man behind so many of the Watermill's recent successes, put his name to work of this sort. Let us hope that this is a one-off aberration, and that normal service will be resumed in West Berkshire for the next production.

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