Robert William Sherwood's plays are commissioned for productions in the States in places such as Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Over here, he's confined to the back room of a Kennington pub, where you would more expect to find a bare-knuckle fight than a work of dramatic art.
Still, this is his long-time laboratory, where he conducts theatrical experiments - in this case a genetically modified "B-play" roguishly toying with the possibilities of film noir.
The story is that of an exhausted private dick who is launched into a paranoid, criminal underworld of professorial misogynists and mobster lesbians after being dumped by his cop wife.
David Mamet would be proud of the craftsmanship that has gone into this tightly wrought dramatic nugget, told in six neatly turned scenes. It's like a card game of sex, death and intrigue crackling with what the author calls the "baroque language" of the noir genre.
Few playwrights working in this country can match Sherwood's ear for a finely bored verbal missile and Ned Cox's direction equals this with a sharp-shooting show.
It's a nightmarish world where shady figures in up-turned collars lurk in dark alleys, Venetian blinds block out the sun and inscrutable villains puff menacingly on cigars.
There's more than a hint of comic-book absurdism, but Cox eschews easy laughs and lends a Kafkaesque edge.
Barbara Barnes and Imogen Walker play cat and mouse with Kerry Shale as the exhausted detective - Barnes as a bitter wife and a Sapphic mobster, Walker as a long, elegant glamour-puss.
Shale, meanwhile, is a shabby rodent of a slippery dick, but the most fun is had by Robert Ashe as his corpulent Svengali, who is as thick round the middle as he is bloated with verbosity.
"Live a little, kill a little," he advises Shale. It's just one tadpole of a thought in a play teeming with many such amusing ideas.
Broads, Bourbon, Bullets, And Betrayal
