Continental Call Girls

ALTHOUGH the programme records nothing of its background or history, the new play at Andrews Lane is out of a very familiar stable. Continental Call Girls - even the title is a double entendre - is a farce of the kind associated with London's West End saucy and sexy, and no strati on the brain.

The central character here is a hen-pecked telephone operator who enlivens his dull job by having imaginative conversations with his female colleagues in various European capitals. At home, he is oppressed by his wife, her brother - his boss - and her mother. A curate lodger, lately from Bonking-on-Sea (get the flavour?) also hectors him.

Fantasy becomes flesh when his phone inamoratas turn up to participate in a girlie Contest in London, and visit him with a view to substituting deeds for words. Edward is small and bald, but they want him anyway, severally and individually. He is terrified, and sets up a maze of crossed lines to extricate himself from a nonstop sequence of sexual and domestic emergencies.

It is not quite as funny as that may sound. Farce should not, of course, he Concerned with the depths of the human psyche, but it helps when it retains a tenuous hold on reality, something we can empathise with.

Terry Byrne directs a good east at a manic pace, all flow and no ebb. Mat Whyte, a talented actor, gives a physical performance of real versatility in the lead role. Nicholas Grennell is a very funny caricature of a Curate under stress of various kinds.

There is a deal of knockabout fun to be had from this formula-driven, reach-me-down farce, but not as much as it aspires to.