The only virtue of David Lindsay-Abaire's aggressively boring farce about a victim of amnesia is its almost instant forgettability.
The play vanishes in a puff of triviality. By the time you read this, I expect that I will no more remember Fuddy Meers than the play's heroine, Claire, can recollect what happened to her the day before.
Claire wakes each morning with her mental slate wiped clean, quite unaware she is married to Nicholas Le Prevost, who rouses her with the morning coffee.
Angus Jackson's heavyhanded production revels in futility and silliness, represented by Act One's climactic violence. The stage is alive with the sound and sight of variously disabled or dysfunctional people. Lindsay-Abaire appears to find such states of mind and body hilarious.
Elderly Gertie, a stroke-victim who talks seeming gibberish, stabs a puppet. A young man with a puppet to hand sounds less than sane. A policewoman wrestles with a teenager for control of a gun. A man with a lisp and limp groans over his stab wounds. I could go on but shall not.
I fear, though, that Fuddy Meers, which Sam Mendes has unwisely chosen to launch his new production company, may be to the bad taste of some of our young in mind.
Two hundred productions have been seen since the play's 1999 premiere in New York. Fuddy Meers has been translated into several languages and is scheduled to become a motion picture.
The play's own modest intention is to raise laughter by crudely depicting a world possessed by craziness and incoherence. Katie Finneran's serene Claire is snatched from her home by Tim Hopper's intense man with a limp and lisp, who wears a manacle and ski mask.
He whisks Claire away to the home of her mother, Gertie, whom poor Julia McKenzie valiantly represents in incoherent babbling. The play's mysteries are preposterously resolved. Athletic Matthew Lillard's ridiculous Millet, with large puppet always to hand, is immersed in this farcical nonsense, whose termination comes as a huge relief.
Until 21 August. Information 020 7452 3000.
