The Capone Trilogy: Loki

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While this ambitious series of plays invites audiences to enter the ganglands of early twentieth century Chicago, Loki is more screwball comedy than stylish crime caper. Coming on like The Thin Man as reimagined by Noël Coward, this is a frantically-paced bedroom comedy, albeit one with a haunting, misanthropic undertone. The line separating real and imaginary characters remains blurred throughout, as does that which divides experience and fantasy. However clouded the nature of protagonist Lola Keen's circumstances, her pathetic fate remains absolute and incontestable.

Suzie Preece carries this dizzying confection and proves herself a brilliantly versatile talent. David Calvitto and Oliver Tilney likewise shine in multiple roles as the men in her life; her tools of self-inflicted chaos and disarray. Throughout one particularly tempestuous day, fiances, lovers, relatives and policemen all come to call on Lola, but so too do a couple of corpses. In trying determinedly to keep her head above water, the glamourous starlet finds herself cast out into a sea of lies, infidelity and murder, with only her liquor-dulled wits to keep her afloat.

Foreshadowing some of the events that will take place in the Capone Trilogy's other two installments, Loki is the most accessible of Jethro Compton's studies into the lost souls who surrendered themselves to the infamous Lexington Hotel. Jamie Wilkes' scripts have a tendency to err toward slavish parody, but his writing here, like the cast's performances, is playful and unselfconscious.