Wild Allegations

115270 original

This new play by Edinburgh Uniiversity's David Barnes and David Leon is a confident piece of comedy writing, well-staged and generally well-performed by its amateur cast. Matthew John Curtis (Ed Sheridan) is a superstar comedy actor in a populist sitcom, but is secretly frustrated by his professional limitations and constantly moans to his girlfriend Theo (Alexandra Wetherell), who tries to persuade him to branch out into something more demanding.

Meanwhile, Curtis’s disaffected brother Alex (Paul Brotherson) harbours a simmering resentment towards him for "stealing" his personality to use as a screen persona, and convinces a journalist (Llinos Henry) to write an undercover expose of Curtis by way of revenge.

The premise itself is only realistic enough to support a sitcom-style comedy, and while the play stays in this territory, it rattles along entertainingly enough. Sheridan has the right sort of bland good looks for the role and puts in an appropriately oblique performance as a man who doesn’t give much of his real self away. Wetherell breathes life into a character who could otherwise be a cut-out femme fatale, but Brotherston has taken a few too many leaves out of Noel Fielding’s book in playing the misguidedly cocky Alex, resulting in a performance that’s more irritating than endearing.

The final, blue-lit scene in a dark alley where the deceptions unravel is an attempt to move into dramatic terrain, but fails because the characters’ motivations, particularly Alex’s, are not psychologically convincing. Still, it’s a sporadically successful effort by a cast and crew containing a few bright sparks.