Joe Jordan is a venal journalist, Brinsley Sheridan a venal pop singer. We discover them in Kathy Strachan's suitably garish setting (suggestive mostly of a TV studio), hurling mutual abuse at one another as if they were natural enemies when they are both recent recruits to Alcoholics Anonymous. Joe is about to be fired from his job because he is costing his maniacal editor too much in libel awards. So they hatch a plot whereby Joe will libel Brinsley and they will share the proceeds.
For some inexplicable reason the lunatic editor accepts the article from Joe and Brinsley finds a venal solicitor who expresses a phobia for barristers but will take the case on and get a senior barrister to argue it. The editor, meanwhile, selects a young up-and-coming barrister to argue the defence (perhaps the unlikeliest turn in an evening of unlikelihoods) and, after the interval, with the setting now avowedly a TV quiz game studio, the trial takes place.
The trial is not of the defamation or otherwise of the plaintiff. Rather, it is, under the crazy eye and hammer of a female judge who may think she is running a TV game, a competition between the two barristers as to who can lather out the greatest vulgar abuse of anyone in the court. One must assume that the author, Declan Lynch (whose first work for the stage this is), has no liking for editors, journalists, pop singers and, especially, lawyers.
It seems, from the available theatrical evidence, that Mr Lynch's dramatic ambition is to create a kind of hellza poppin anarchy on the stage. But all the worthwhile craziness that has been created in theatre (mostly, it should be said, in American vaudeville) has had its own crazy logic and a lunatic consistency to carry it through. Here there is no sign of any such mad coherence. The reported alcoholism has no narrative consequence. The phobic solicitor shows no signs of her phobia in her dealings with the barrister. No seed of zaniness planted early in the evening comes to flower later. Everything is utterly inconsequential, even the editor's progressive madness, as the author keeps moving the theatrical goalposts until, apparently, he gets tired and just stops with a series of individual statements that have almost no relevance to anything that has happened in the preceding two hours.
Not even the creative ingenuity of the director, Gerard Stembridge, is able to put any dramatic shape on the farrago. The considerable energy of such actors as Tom Hickey (the crazed editor), Helene Montague (the phobic solicitor), Joe Hanley (the venal journalist) and the substantial style of Arthur Riordan (the pop singer), Jonathan White (the young barrister) and Terry Byrne (the more senior counsel) are dissipated by the lack of focus and coherence in the text.
