There are few things the theatre likes more than a good play about itself. Dramas featuring those lovably crazy individuals who work in the business called show are always a draw, offering us, it seems, a glimpse into the darker reality behind the dazzle of the footlights. So it proves once more here, in this moderately powerful solo show about a one-time grand homme of the stage reduced to tatty touring work.
The Actor - the son, wouldn't you just know it, of an actress and a bishop - used to be famous and in something good whose name he can't remember, but for the past 20 years has performed a rackety piece whose length is governed despotically by the burning time of candles. He has one all-consuming obsession: will he too die "in harness" like those other stage legends Edmund Kean, Henry Irving and Tommy Cooper?
On the odd occasion when he stops gulping down whisky and remembers his lines, the Actor is tackling The Grand Inquisitor - The Quiz - from The Brothers Karamazov.
The trouble is that the marvellously haggard-looking David Bradley, all got up in monk's robe and crucifix in David Giles's well-paced production, makes the Actor's accounts of his own life so wonderfully rambling and caustically funny we get irritated when Dostoevsky interrupts, for all the mirroring symbolism of a last, long night of the soul.
Writer Richard Crane struggles to bring his enjoyable words to much of a conclusion but does offer one tantalising moment of meta-textuality that merits further development. "This isn't real, you know," says Bradley, pointing to the would-be whisky and taking yet another slug from the bottle. An actor playing an Actor who says that it's all an act? Tell us more.
Until 28 June (0870 060 6632).
The Quiz
Trafalgar Studios
Whitehall, SW1A 2DY
