Winner’s Curse – Park Theatre, London

Writers: Daniel Taub with Dan Patterson

Director: Jez Bond

From haggling for money with your neighbour, to a thumb war and drawing a ‘P’ on your forehead to understand empathy, the audience interaction in Winner’s Curse at the Park Theatre is designed to teach the art of negotiation. But these moments have an energy that isn’t consistently maintained during the rest of the play despite a fine start, as writers Daniel Taub and Dan Patterson stage a negotiation between fictional warring nations where a young man learns the tricks of his new trade.

Hugo Leitski becomes apprentice to respected peacemaker Korsakov and soon accompanies him on a mission to broker a settlement with a bordering enemy nation. Along the way they encounter a difficult train journey, strange landladies and eventually the opposite delegation where Leitski learns how to conduct the negotiation dance without falling on his face.

Staged as a prize winning speech delivered decades later, after an illustrious career, Winner’s Curse is a comedy essay on the formula for success in which the elder Leitski, played by Clive Anderson, presides over events. And preside he does, drawing on his quick-fire presenting style familiar to regular viewers of Whose Line Is it Anyway. Anderson is still occasionally finding his cues but makes the ideal Master of Ceremonies, forming the story as the narrator, interrupting the delivery to emphasise the lessons and rousing the audience to participate in lots of separate activities quite cheerfully.

The story of Winner’s Curse is well created, satirical and occasionally cartoonish in nature but gives a good sense of the people in the room and, to some extent, the stakes laying out the process in a step-by-step lecture-style with illustrations for every point in a way that still feels like theatre. But the wider context and its purpose is less obvious, including the role of odd landlady of the Blue Lagoon hotel whose sole purpose is to deliver surreal but tangential comedy interludes along with a catchphrase of a kind that soon wears thin. Taub and Patterson try to weave her into the story, giving her a piece of the pie to play for, but it feels like a sketch of a character designed largely to create a better gender balance.

The performances do much to compensate, however, with Arthur Conti, in particular, who makes a fine comic debut as the naive and slightly hapless Hugo, known as ‘lightweight’ by his boss, and the ever reliable Michael Maloney who brings range to Korsakov and even some heart. Nicola McAuliffe certainly embraces the strangeness of her roles as Vaslika even if the material feels thin, while Barrie Rutter, Winnie Arhin and Greg Lockett fill out the rival negotiating positions well.

At two hours and 30-minutes, Winner’s Curse could eschew some of its own advice and cut to the chase a little more quickly, perhaps in a slicker 90-minute format with just the lessons, the relevant staged examples and the audience games that would make its points far clearer. And with Taub’s negotiation experience to call upon, the message that winning too easily is never winning at all is the one to send the audience home with.

Runs until 11 March 2023