For all its quirkiness, it’s a drag Quentin Letts
THE MENTALISTS
by Richard Bean, Wyndham’s Theatre
★★✩✩✩
PLAYWRIGHT Richard Bean had a wonderful success with ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ but since then he has been squeezing the toothpaste tube a little too hard. His latest comedy has a few moments of distinctly English mirth but it is a slight offering – a half-hour skit stretched to almost two hours with interval, presumably to boost bar takings at Wyndham’s Theatre.
Two failures, Ted and Morrie, are in a Bdivision hotel room in London. Morrie, a part-time barber, has agreed to shoot a sales video of Ted, who wishes to promote his view of a ‘radical, socially-engineered community’. Ted is manager of a fleet of cars for a company based in Swindon. His revolutionary views? A Ukippy version of Russell Brand.
Occasional contact with the outer world occurs via telephone and notes slipped under the bedroom’s cheap door. Ted expresses his political ideas in the language of lower management.
If all this sounds like a cross between Harold Pinter’s ‘Dumb Waiter’ and TV’s ‘The Office’ this may be because Ted is played by Stephen Merchant, co-creator of ‘The Office’. He is an immediately comical figure, being tall, skinny, bespectacled with beardy and almost verminous features. Add a West Country accent.
Ted has occasional riffs against the world – for instance, against the Greeks (‘they peaked early’) or against woodwork teachers for instilling a culture of under-achievement in British youngsters by expecting them to produce only one ‘lousy cheeseboard’ every three months. ‘Japanese kids are turning out twenny thousand cheeseboards every f***ing hour!’ says this Che Guevara of the Wiltshire industrial estates. Having worked on such an estate in my time, and indeed having been brought up a mile or so from Ted’s home of North Cerney, I recognise the type.
Morrie (Steffan Rhodri) is there chiefly as a foil to this flipped infantryman of the suppressed lower middle classes. Ted is a lively creation but, after ‘The Office’, he feels less than entirely innovative.
Yet the play lacks theatricality. There is a moment in the first half when Morrie falls asleep while listening to his friend. I nearly joined him in snoozy oblivion. For all its quirkiness, the evening drags.