Waiting for Harry

Valentine Guinness, lead singer of the rock band Darling, has written a tissue box of sob stories and assembled a cast of crack film and TV actors to bawl them out.

First to turn on the taps in this fortysomething recrudescence of Peter's Friends, is Simon Dutton as a newspaper hack with a gambling problem who makes a point of only ever bedding foreign girls. Dutton is hosting a reunion of friends from college, 20 years on, in his scruffy little bachelor pad in order to help out wayward buddy, Harry.

First to arrive is David Michaels as an edgy barrister with a not very surprising sexual secret, closely followed by Adrian Lukis as a provincial sculptor who rues the day he failed to elope with a nubile charlady. The charlady happens to be the former girlfriend of Jay Villiers's depressed antiques dealer who is now locked in a sham marriage. Finally, there's James Wilby as a homophobic City slicker with a weakness for kinky sex. Collectively the group guzzle gallons of drink and grieve over their mid-life jaundice.

The problem is not the sob stories themselves (we've all got one), but the way they are crudely stitched together. It may be Guinness's first play, but it is also an early draft. Individual stories are therefore tenuously precipitated and the consequences of sensitive revelations are often not always followed through. When they are followed through, as with one of the group revealing his gay transvestism, the reaction of another that he is "perverted" is not only unlikely among such tortured wastrels, it is also too dated to be worth dignifying with dramatic consideration.

However, the details of Guinness's characters' stories at least give them the ring of authenticity and fuels spirited performances from director Nickolas Grace's boisterous ensemble. Dutton is a shilly-shallying nice guy hack, Michaels is a wounded, boyish barrister, Wilby a boorish broker and Jay Villiers a sullen antiques dealer imprisoned in a pinstripe suit. But Adrian Lukis stands out as a sardonic sculptor, busily laughing, goading, sulking and dreaming.

Will Bowen's set is a meticulously realistic bachelor pad complete with stopped clock, dead plant and septic fish tank. But neither this design, nor Grace's direction is able to infuse Guinness's play with the Chekhovian ennui it seems to crave. Despite a credit in the programme, the character Harry never turns up. Either he was cut at a late stage or he is a Godot-like hoax. In any event Guinness's likeable but ineffectual script is in need of the kind of group therapy that these friends intend to mete out to this missing character.

Hello, Jerry!