Hotel Nowhere

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Oddly for a play situated in a plush hotel, Hotel Nowhere isn’t particularly comfortable to watch. The eighth-floor suite of the Jury’s Inn, just off the Royal Mile, doesn’t run its air conditioning during the performance, turning a clever site-specific idea into a stuffy sweatbox.

The novel location is probably the most striking feature of the play. Six characters move around a generic, anonymous hotel as their relationships come under strain and boundaries are broken. No one seems to be able to leave the hotel, or use it to escape their pasts. At their centre is a burned-out young politician who unwisely leaves himself open to an affair with another guest.

An early, humorous scene where this character calls another room to apologise for sneaking into their fundraising dinner and accidentally elects himself as charity trustee poorly sets up a morose, sorrowful play. The twists are entirely predictable as the plot slowly teases out backstories and advances the romantic angle at a fairly pedestrian pace. Some decent performances, including a wonderfully facile and mean-spirited supermodel, save the show from complete disaster.

The ending is abrupt, unsatisfying and leaves much of the story hanging. Like so much else of the play, it seems it simply didn’t know how to tie everything together properly. This is a shame, since so much more could have been done with the play’s location and the themes of isolation and disconnection it explores.