BWW Reviews: LOVE, QUESTION MARK, Tabard Theatre, November 12 2011

Michael Smith, retired estate agent and widower, is talking to us about love, sex and the impossibility of living up to society's hypocritical expectations of monogamy. Intermittently throughout the play, he does this, citing scientific studies of sexual behaviour in animals and the writings (somewhat inevitably) of the Marquis de Sade, banging the drum for banging, as it were.

After five minutes of so of this lecturing, Maria arrives with suitcases and a hideous, though hardly uncommon, backstory of child abuse in the favelas of Argentina leading to prostitution and her new status as a kind of pet kept for sex and little else by Michael in his flat.

If that sounds rather unpromising material for a racy comedy, then I would be misleading you, because there are enough acerbic remarks and biting satire to reveal the potential of this odd couple and odd structure. That the show never really takes off is not down to Claire Cameron, who is sexy, scary and sarcastic as Maria, showing the claws that everyone knew she had except the hapless Michael. Nor is it the fault of Stuart Sessions, who captures the desperation of a middle-aged man who wants to squeeze what pleasure is left to him out of life as the testosterone ebbs away. The problem lies with playwright Robert Gillespie, who just does not give these selfish characters enough empathy for us to care about their fates.

What could have been an interesting examination of the power relations between men and women in a globalised marriage market in which liberal values pale in the face of economic inequalities, instead becomes a mix of cod psychology, petty bickering about going to Tesco and a bit of half-hearted S&M. There's a good play in there somewhere, and it peeps out from under the carapace of misogynistic self-centredness on occasion, but too infrequently for me to leave the theatre feeling anything other than relief to leave Michael and Maria to sort out their own problems, while I get back to mine.

Love, Question Mark is at the Tabard Theatre until 23 November