By FRANCIS TILL
Four sketches by James McLaughlin are on offer in this two-hour pot-pourri. So is McLaughlin, who stars in three of them alongside the talented Paul Paice.
Despite the venue, these vignettes are not comedy sketches. There are funny lines and well-developed shticks but nothing here is played just
for laughs, and one of the pieces, Shine, is about as anti-comedy a work as one is likely to find anywhere.
McLaughlin writes cartoon characters and clowns very well, and some of his creations - like the manic-depressive Tim in the opener, Inertia - are gems. But overall his characters cannot sustain the burden of dramatic tension and his writing simply isn't up to tragedy.
Pathos, too, often becomes its own discomfiting twin, bathos, in the high relief of McLaughlin's writing style.
When it gets serious, the text is generally too purple for public display and can become the worst imaginable enemy of the points it tries to drive home.
This is nowhere more apparent than in Shine, in which a normally sparkling Lisette de Jong is hung, draped in black, on a bizarre crucifix and made to declaim, in the most distressingly orotund manner possible, a mawkish prose poem while "eurythmist" Kimberle Parker drifts around the stage in scarlet. It's all very Sarah Bernhardt and way over the top, even if some of the images inside the text are interesting.
That might be partly a failure of the direction provided by Robyn Donnelly, but in other places Donnelly reveals a well-developed sense of timing, staging and pace that is completely lacking in Shine.
McLaughlin is at his best as a lunatic and he spends a great deal of time in that mode during his three performances. Inertia, which takes up the first hour, needs pruning and more of the refreshing Cath Campbell, who plays three different, interesting parts.
Cave In, last presented at the Covert in September, has been shortened and tightened to good effect. Turn, the closer, is a witty ditty that packs the most punch of the night.
