edinburgh festival

THREE GOOD REASONS

FOR A MENAGE A TROIS

An odd trio trade vices in a class A hit, writes Diane Dubois

v.best

of the fest

I Know What You Want *****

Komedia@Southside

THE rapid fire pace of this blistering comedy is established as soon as the lights go up on this story of three youngish people forced by circumstances into sharing a flat. The opening where much of the hmour takes place off stage, is truly inventive. Finally, on to the stage arrives what must surely be one of the most hystericallly irritating characters ever invented.

Sarah Mann gives a dazzling performance in the frenzied, jabbering and very challenging role of Penny, who is so obviously besotted with her silent, scary, skinny friend Tony. Penny believes Tony to be a recovering alcoholic, but he is a secret drinker and, when he drinks, Michael D'Cruze is allowed to demonstrate what a fine actor he is, playing Tony as a man who with liquor inside him becomes a charming, chatty, debonair wit with apenchant for quoting Noel Coward and Dylan Thomas.

If Tony was not an alcoholic before hooking up with Penny, that woman would be enough to drive anyone to drink, with her incessant babbling and wild mood swings, which she shoots through like greased lightning to great comic effect. When they finally sleep together she is fulfilled and ecstatic, he trapped and devastated.

Enter the startingly beautiful and frighteningly thin Joan played by Stephanie Prince with splendidly bitchy zeal.A big-time wheeler-dealer in the 1980s, she is now short of cash and hates the fact that she has to tolerate her two flatmates, who are there to fund her cocaine habit. She launches into one partocularly blue patch of effing and blinding, to hilarious effect, and so it transpires that she, too, also fancies Tony something rotten.

The ensueing scene, where the two closet debauchees share their vices, is as extreme in its realism as it is in its wicked ribaldry.

But for all the outrageous humour, this play has a black heart. This splendid tale is reminiscent of The Caretaker, but with bags of laughs and no pauses to interrupt its relentless pace.

Jim Madden has written an extraordinary script that allows his cast to show off all of their theatrical skills to huge effect. The wonderful writing loops about, losing its own thread deliberately, like a Vodka-swigging coke-head on a big hit. Which is exactly what this Class A comedy deserves to be.

Until 27 August

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