Having spent 30 years in the movie business making such films as Get Carter and Flash Gordon, Mike Hodges is entitled to go a bit stir crazy.
But this is ridiculous. His new play about a movie star who won't come out of his hotel room, fires off some great one-liners, but simply doesn't make sense.
To begin with all the characters are wilfully bizarre, ranging from a stereotypically bitchy producer to an armed guard who is a paranoid "Mormon affiliate". As they and hotel staff stand outside the movie star's room, voodoo noises emanate from within, film scripts are flung from the window and human blood leaks down the door.
Clearly something extremely left-field is going on in a David Lynch, Twin Peaks sort of way and Hodges himself presumably knows the score. The trouble is that no one else seems to be in on the secret - and that includes the actors themselves. Drifting on and off with little motivation, the performers are just mouthpieces for satirical scoffing, playing their lines solely for laughs.
Thankfully, there are plenty of these laughs sending up the childish avarice of the film industry with such scathing quips as "people in movies can't read and those that can are limited to numerals".
Aside from the gags, the best things about the show are Ken McClymont's set and Frank Usher's lighting. These features perfectly capture the air-conditioned, funeral parlour ambience of flash hotels. But if you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, or a film by its poster, you certainly shouldn't judge a play by its design. Hodges's satire of movie-making's titanically egotistical superficiality therefore becomes very superficial itself. You know how Hodges must feel having spent three decades immersed in such madness.
The only thing is, his play is no less frustrating to watch. There's no doubting his film credentials, but in theatrical terms the director of Get Carter needs to get smarter.
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