Review: BITS OF ME ARE FALLING APART, Soho Theatre, 7 November 2016

For a 59-year-old man - and you can take this from a 53-year-old man who knows a bit about it - Adrian Edmondson looks in very decent nick. Vyvyan (from the legendary sitcom - well, sorta sitcom - The Young Ones), is not young any more and that passage of time is the subject of Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart, an adaptation not of Edmondson's life, which might have been more fun, but journalist William Leith's, first published as a book.

It's a monologue (adapted by Edmondson and director Steve Marmion) aided by some witty props by Lily Arnold that captures a moment in a writer's life when his relationship with his partner has collapsed and he reflects back on how things turned out the way they did. It's a grab bag of middle-aged, middle-class problems, not without a certain poignancy, but, for all Edmondson's skilled delivery and starry charisma, just a bit dull.

There's the health problems of course - the bits that are falling apart - and the tedium of the exercise and the health foods to keep the worst of the nasties at bay. There's the regret over the joy of a carefree life in one's twenties morphing into the responsibilities, routines and confidence-knocking setbacks of one's thirties and beyond, the drink and drugs once a welcome distraction, now a needy urge just short of a dependency. There's also the son who, for one day in a fortnight, makes it all go away in a blitz of unfettered love.

Just over an hour all-through, the test for a show like this is whether it makes you want to go out and buy the book to read more about its subject and his travails, to find out how he's doing now and whether he did get back together with his son's mother or found a new love to complete a life very much viewed as half-empty rather than half-full. But, for all my admiration of the performer's work in the past and in this show, I left feeling not bothered either way.

Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart continues at Soho Theatre until 3 December.