Wingman

In an era when heart-warming has become a term more pejorative than complimentary, one uses it in a review only after much hesitation. Wingman, however, is heart-warming: gloriously, upliftingly, unapologetically heart-warming. You leave with a tear in your eye and a generally restored faith in humanity.

This is not to say it's trite. The wit is too acute, the observation too real. There are moments when you forget that it is Richard Marsh's fictionalised alter ego on stage and believe that he is recounting his own history.

The story is one of restitution and new life. It is about the death of an adored iconoclast of a mother ("suffering as herself, a glorious autumn"), the difficult road to reconciliation with a father who left 20 years before ("I share his surname, nothing else"), and Marsh's own accidental accession to fatherhood. In Marsh's universe flowers, literal and metaphorical, grow out of shit.

As with Marsh's other hit, Dirty Great Love Story, Wingman is a verse play. Or at least, a relaxed verse play. The verse slips in and out of focus, interspersed with dialogue and jokey banter between Marsh and his father (a pitch-perfect performance from Jerome Wright). If anything the rhyming elements are too strong, artificially manipulating messy emotions into jarringly neat couplets.

At times the final twenty minutes veer dangerously close to becoming a rhyming Tony Parsons novel. No matter. Marsh's ability to find humour in the human and his tenderness for our frailty remains constant throughout.