Review: BRIAN AND ROGER, Menier Chocolate Factory

We've all known a Brian and we've all known a Roger. The former is the friend who's always there for you, always returns your calls, always offering an opportunity or two just when you need it. The latter is that needy guy, the guy who depends a little too much on that one friend for support, the guy so eager to please. The trouble is that Roger is too credulous and Brian is too hideous.

Written by Harry Peacock and Dan Skinner (who plays Roger), this play grew out of a successful podcast born when the two comics improvised sketches based on two divorced men failing to cope with the aftermaths of their break-ups, their lives spinning in an ever-closer spiral, whilst simultaneously whirling out of control. David Babani's translation of that format to the stage requires a great deal of shouting into phones and voicemail messages - and, as anyone who has a caught a late train from nearby London Bridge can attest, even the most sparkling of conversationalists can outstay their welcome in the seat opposite you. It does get a little tiresome, despite some excellent video projections from Timothy Bird to divert us..

Simon Lipkin plays the outrageous Brian with great energy and chutzpah, cranking up the selfishness and entitlement. Skinner gives us a Roger with a puppy's desire to please and a pathetic (in the nicest sense) belief that his separation from Claire is merely a temporary hiccup in an otherwise lifetime partnership - it isn't. Brian's Romanian-funded trans-Asian superhighway project isn't all it might be either.

The key structural issue in the play is that Brian has to start as such a bastard and Roger such a doormat that it doesn't give much scope for comedic progression - on the Nigel Tufnell scale, they're at 11 from their first conversation. As the demands Brian makes on Roger become more outlandish, the two real men we met swiftly descend to caricatures and then merely avatars of their neuroses. We need to see ourselves in these lost souls, but we lose that identification too quickly - instead we see two devices for slapstick and cruelty, the absurd overtaking the everyday as the overarching tone.

So subtle Brian and Roger is not - it's subtitle, A Highly Offensive Play, is well-earned, but dialling back the more offensive flights of fancy in favour of the genuinely poignant (which does make a welcome appearance from time to time) would ground the comedy in lived experience, rather than pitching us into a game in which both characters bid to be the more extreme in their exhibition of their flaws.

Brian and Roger is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 18 December

Photo Nobby Clark

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