Veiled in laughter

If Bridget Jones had been a foreign-aid worker, then she may well have resembled Laura, a self-confessed Heataholic who is as fascinated by "Nicole Kidman stuck in a portable toilet" as in any problems involving a burka.

Richard Bean's laugh-a-second comedy about an NGO centre in a fictional Third-World country, Tambia, looks at the effects that mobile phones, copies of Cosmopolitan and tarty shoes can have on those experiencing life on either side of the veil.

In the hands of a less-experienced writer, this could so easily have proved crass, but Bean has already proved himself a skilled dramatic navigator of such varied subjects as trawlermen in Hull or a madman producing a demented Utopian vision.

The audience roars with laughter as Monday, a young Tambian man, declares, "I sell anything Russian. Kalashnikovs, second-hand heart-attack defibrillators, Pringles," but they also have to grapple with the fact that he supports female circumcision and partly wants a wife so he can beat her.

A country devoid of resources is expressed in the sand-dry set dominated by one wall of a corrugated-iron shack.

As Laura, Georgia Mackenzie exudes a strangely worldly naivety, so that while she delivers half-baked views from The Idiot's Guide to Islam, Bean also reveals her as an Idiot's-Guide-savant by endowing her with a strategic know-how that enables her to score several points over her NGO employer, Roderick Smith's joint-smoking cynic Keith.

David Oyewolo's hilarious yet conflicted Monday sums up Bean's celebration of the infinite contradictions of the human condition, highlighting its absurdities to take a freshly sharpened scalpel to its tragedies. It says much that Monday eventually comes across as a sympathetic character and his journey in the play, involving tangles with oil thieves, rituals in the woods and the discovery of pornographic TV reveals disturbing aspects both of democratic and Islamic culture.

This young playwright is not the only Mr Bean with a huge gift for comedy. Just a little more seriousness could make this a dramatic gem.

The God Botherers