PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Theatre Royal Bath (31 Oct-5 Nov)

THEATRE Take one smooth-talking, philandering businessman. Put him in the kitchen of what was once his family home with ex-wife/former yummy mummy Miranda, best friend James (a gauche, upwardly-mobile wide boy with a Peter Pan complex), his dying dog and Martin the family vet and voila! The scene for a British middle class version of a less-than-gripping episode of 'Coronation Street' is set.

Award-winning scriptwriter Nick Fisher’s latest mild comedy of manners reunites two of the stars from his recent BBC drama 'Manchild' (Nigel Havers and Christine Kavanagh), subjecting them both to the circumstance of analysing their relationship all over again. Completing a line-up that pretty much guarantees to attract the contemporary chattering classes in droves, former 'Archers' star Graham Seed (hoorah! Nigel Pargetter lives on!) plays the family vet, while 'Birds of a Feather' stalwart David Cardy completes a crowd-pleasing cast supplemented by an animatronic dog destined to set aspirational standards for am-dram companies guaranteed to resurrect Fisher’s scripts for decades to come. The support, meanwhile, comes courtesy of a rollcall of the lifestyle accessories that leafy British suburbia can’t function without: Waitrose, Nigella, golf courses and tennis courts, Le Creuset, John Lewis and Kettle Chips are all duly namechecked time and again, while the cumbersome range cooker in the corner of the kitchen plays such a pivotal role to the drama that the brand name should be writ large across the front of every theatre hosting the play.

But as far as contemporary Aga sagas go, 'Basket Case' generally manages to keep a tried-and-trusted recipe simmering along nicely throughout. While the opening scenes are twee enough to make Alan Ayckbourn look like David Mamet, the pace picks up considerably as events roll along. Havers eventually brings welcome depth to a role that starts off as a superficial caricature of selfish rake, forcing Kavanagh to shift up a gear from one-dimensional victim to woman on the verge of a breakthrough. The occasional bouts of verbal ping-pong between Cardy and Seed, meanwhile, are well-paced comedy moments at their almost-best. If you like your drama unchallenging and your evenings at the theatre as cosy as a night in front of the fire watching reruns of BBC sitcoms, you really couldn’t weave a better basket to snuggle up in. (Melissa Blease)

Copyright Melissa Blease 2011