Kevin Elyot's fine, dark comedies usually play games with time and centre upon the loneliness of long-distance sexual yearners, whose hopeless or secret love never diminishes.
The unfunny, hourlong Forty Winks returns to Elyot's old theatrical terrain to depict one more introverted hankerer, obsessively trying to bring back yesterday.
Elyot varies his theme by suggesting his seeker of a lost romance, Dominic Rowan's glum Don, requires a younger replica of the original love-object.
The boredom and irritation that the time-jumbled Forty Winks engenders has, however, little to do with its thematic familiarity, and more with its air of contrivance, the superficiality and chronic aimlessness that infect it.
When, after 14 years thirtyish Don reappears in the life of Anastasia Hille's overwhelmingly nervous Diana, he finds her thrilled to see him, but preoccupied with an unadored husband and teenage daughter, Hermia.
The ponderous central scene on Diana's Hampstead veranda, where her gay brother-in-law, Charlie (Paul Ready), proves just as excited by Don's arrival, oozes drab nostalgia.
That dreadful question, "So what've you been up to", inspires sequences of flamboyantly boring information-exchange. It almost feels as if Elyot is filling theatrical time rather than using it.
"I went all over Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia" or "When I was a kid, it was my pets kept me company" people begin and continue in dramatically unrevealing form.
Only after the arrival of Hermia, whose narcolepsy is regarded as a minor problem, does Forty Winks briefly rouse itself. Don's emotionally disturbed condition, at which Dominic Rowan's downcast withdrawn performance has more than hinted, becomes shockingly apparent in his hotel room. Yet this scene, and one when he reappears 16 years later, strike psychologically gross, simplistic notes.
Read More
The production by that remarkable director Katie Mitchell moves at an elderly tortoise's pace, with delays to rearrange Hildegard Bechtler's ridiculously opulent designs for a roofed veranda.
The sound effects are given melodramatic resonance. Even Miss Hille exploiting her considerable gift for playing characters in the grip of neurosis and Carey Mulligan, riveting as the narcoleptic Hermia, cannot invigorate Forty Winks.
Until 4 December. Information 020 7565 5000.
Forty Winks
