I blame Alan Bennett. The Yorkshire writer’s achingly humane 1980s Talking Heads monologues for supposedly “ordinary” characters have inspired countless others to pen inferior soliloquies highlighting unexplored lives. This wispy, 65-minute solo show from Michael Wynne is a case in point, charting the slow collapse of a working-from-home IT specialist whose only companion is a large cactus called Clive.
BAFTA and Olivier winner Wynne, performer Paul Keating and director Lucy Bailey all have proven theatrical track records but here serve up a production that’s pitifully thin and unconvincing. Even the deployment of the cactus as a proxy, to explain why this character is speaking to us – like Wilson the basketball for Tom Hanks in Cast Away – doesn’t really work.
