My Wife Fell in Love with a Life Size Cardboard Cut-Out of Ronan Keating – Drayton Arms Theatre, London

Writer: PT Rose, adapted by Tegwyn Burges

Director: Yvonne Patterson

Some plays touch on the hot topics of our time with such razor-sharp clarity that they encourage those with entrenched sociopolitical positions to question the very nature of their own feelings and prejudices. Then there are those that are so terribly assembled, directed, and performed that any message that they intend to convey is shouted down by the question of how they ever made it to the stage in the first place. My Wife Fell in Love with a Life Size Cardboard Cut-Out of Ronan Keating is very much in the latter camp.

The ostensible plot is that Sally (Francesca Mepham) is a woman obsessed with Ronan Keating. As she prepares a meal in honour of his birthday, the other members of her weird family begin to assemble. Her mother, a lifelong David Bowie fan who has had a Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt face tattoo all her life; a partner, a children’s entertainer with a penchant for religious aphorisms; a non-binary Buddhist convert child who is saving up for top surgery; and a motorbike-loving grandmother who claims to be a Sikh so she can wear a turban instead of a crash helmet. There’s also an Elvis impersonator booked as a surprise for the grandmother (whose birthday it also seems to be), who turns out to be a plumber from Somerset.

That’s instantly a lot to take in. And there is a world where such a collection of bizarre characters struggling to make sense of one another’s lives might contain nuggets of wisdom. It’s even possible that this script might have been capable of delivering on such a promise had not every line been delivered by a cast of actors who struggle to remember them. Shaz Rocket’s Joe, ostensibly Sally’s first husband and the narrator of the piece, comes on book-in-hand for his Act II appearances and even then loses his place. Another cast member elsewhere seems to be checking their script on their phone.

Nathan Nuurah’s Elvis impersonator, which requires either an authentic Presley accent or a genuine Somerset one, achieves neither. Simon Charles’s clown, who starts Act I as the only sane character, delivers every line with emphasis that might be suitable once or twice to drive a point home but which gets wearying when utilised on every occasion. That makes for an unpleasant counterpoint to Mepham’s Sally, whose every utterance is shrieked in the manner of a woman who has long since lost any connection with reality.

At least that is consistent with the character, who has no compunction about offering unsolicited opinions about black people, immigrants, Muslims, gay people, trans people, and benefits claimants. There is an underlying thread about her hypocrisy – she has been claiming herself after an accident despite her injuries being long since healed. But Sally is no Alf Garnett, whose diatribes were carefully constructed monologues that punctured both insular bigotry and those who opposed it.

Instead, it’s a mess of half-baked ideas and political satire that feels like it has been constructed by someone who scrolled through Twitter and decided that anything they saw there would make for a good plot point, so long as any sense or logic was excised.

As the actors stumble from one cliché to the next, it feels as if Lily Starkey’s Phil is the only character even approaching a cognisance of the script. As the character faces up to their mother and grandmother rejecting their chosen pronouns and insisting on calling them “Philippa”, there is a sense that the character’s story could be a fruitful one if handled sensitively.

It’s not. In Act II (for those foolhardy enough to ignore the onstage plea that if you didn’t enjoy Act I, you shouldn’t stick around after the interval), every character turns on Phil as they express their desire for affirmative surgery. Countless tired and hokey clichés are pulled out of the woodwork, JK Rowling’s name is dropped, and even those who had been supportive adopt an “it’s society that needs to change, not your body” line that Phil comes to embrace wholeheartedly.

Compounding that, Rocket’s return as Joe now has the character proclaiming that his name includes the n-word, which he reclaims and insists everyone else uses. This comes across more as a desire for the play to be edgy and controversial rather than to spring from character. Whatever point the playwright (or their adapter, although what this play is an adaptation of is unclear) is trying to make with this subplot is as ineffectual and unaccomplished as everything else.

At one point, the characters start railing against Generation Z and standing up for the “right to be offended”. Perhaps the script is intended to be brutishly offensive to make a point. But it’s not necessarily the language that’s the most offensive part of My Wife Fell in Love…. It’s the lack of attention and care, the under-rehearsed mess, and the inability to give any character the sense of roundedness that makes them anything other than a mouthpiece for half-baked bigotry.

On a press night plagued by missed lighting cues, the play ended with two characters frozen to the spot as the expected lights down never arrived. It was the only genuinely funny moment of the entire sorry farrago. The right to be offended is important, and there is nothing more offensive than asking audience members to pay to see such an awful spectacle.

The only person who comes out of this with any respect is Keating himself. The life-sized cut-out at the back of the stage, in addition to giving the most well-rounded performance of the night, has two other benefits: It cannot see or hear any of the disgrace going on around it.

Continues until 9 November 2024