The Real Thing was a little low on passion

Despite a fine cast at the Malvern Theatre, headed by Neil Pearson - he of Drop the Dead Donkey fame - tensions never truly smouldered, leaving the comic diversions peppering the play as highlights.

Plays about playwrights are always likely to be difficult terrain - they have to avoid being self-indulgent while engaging the theatregoer. At least The Real Thing managed to negotiate this potential hurdle.

Still, the spark that would have ignited a promising plotline was absent.

Pearson played Henry, supposedly the sharpest and most wickedly playwright of his generation. This never came across totally convincingly, which probably undermined the whole premise of the story.

His affair with Annie (Geraldine Alexander) seemed functional, rather than exciting and it was hard to empathise with the lovers, as indeed it was with any of the quartet of leading characters.

The betrayed Charlotte (Marsha Fitzalan) and Max (Michael Lumsden) were all very civilised about the situation, which might have been the adult thing to do but only perpetuated the rather humdrum air of the proceedings.

Far and away the best thing in The Real Thing was Pearson's soliloquy about a cricket bat, which jolted the post-interval part of the play into life, all too briefly, before it flattened out again.

If the passion that inflamed the character of Henry when he launched into his rant about the cricket bat had spread to the rest of the play it could have stoked the potential inferno of emotions demanded of a story of this sort. Review by PETE McMILLAN