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Theatre Review: Margaret and Ken and the End of the World

'A cliched, mean-spirited and desperate mess,' Lorna Irvine reviews the latest from A Play, a Pie and a Pint.

So, a bag lady walks into a psychiatrist's office and says she thinks she's God.

Such is the premise for Sean Hardie's latest, his fifth for Oran Mor, the twist being that the shrink in question Ken (portrayed in a perfunctory manner by Greg Powrie) is a sad alcoholic with a wife who is cheating on him, and Margaret, the seemingly delusional woman (Anne Lacey, very good despite the initial babblings) knows every detail of his miserable existence, right down to erectile dysfunction. She then claims that she can end the world in less than fifty minutes, and the countdown begins.

The irony is that the cruel, shallow caricatures which persist here do nothing but help people laugh at the very ones who need love, support and understanding.

This is the kind of dated nonsense that gives theatre a bad name- laboured and unsubtle humour, jokes that were stolen in the first place (there's a Bill Hicks one thrown in there) and a kind of 70s throwback to the 'wibble, wibble' facile humour of TheTwo Ronnies et al at their least inspired.

Mental illness can be a ripe subject for comedy, as can many emotive, difficult and contentious subjects- look at mid-period Woody Allen and his neuroses- but the fact that Lacey gets the biggest laugh ad-libbing when the doorknob in the set's door doesn't work means there is something far wrong here. A cliched, mean-spirited and desperate mess.

Tags: theatre

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