An adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s bleak, blackly comic novel from 1941, this dramatises the passion that a hapless drunk, George Harvey Bone, has for a nasty drunk, Netta Longdon. Fidelis Morgan’s version has one actress play Netta and another impersonate Bone’s conscience, but with them alternating roles throughout. The reasoning, presumably, is that, as one so much consumes the other, they are two sides of the same coin; so we have two Nettas, Clare Calbraith and Caroline Faber. Both hold their own, but, rather than emphasising how strange, how changing, this woman is, this trick makes you notice the gap between the actresses — and think it’s in there, somewhere, Netta lies, with Faber all husky and melancholy and Calbraith sharp and flighty. In short, Netta becomes hard to calibrate, and so does the piece. You almost wish it were more scruffy, less lyrical, because the sadness here lies in the squalor of it all. Decked out in dingy prewar decor, the Finborough hits the spot; in fact, it feels remarkably oppressive. Matthew Flynn makes a vivid Bone and the rest of the cast are equally bright. But a bit less theatricality would have made this a tighter bit of theatre; trusting in the story itself, mediocre as it is.

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