The Birmingham Rep

Until 15th February

Richard Lutz watches David Essex take centre stage in this dark comedy.

A Zen master, high up in the Japanese mountains, once told me: “Seek perfection- whether you are in the kennel or the mansion.”

Well, not really. I don’t know any Zen masters. But if he had said that, his watchwords would have been bang on for this modest three hander based in the bowels of a London restaurant.

Emmet is a high flying financier  who gets sacked and – improbably – finds work in the dishwashing back room. His boss Dressler, played by Essex, is a man who demands excellence even if it means accepting you are cleaning up the grubby end of a plate from noisy arrogant diners upstairs.

A third worker called Moss, enigmatic, dying, with the cryptic ramblings of a Beckett character is slowly, through his senility or madness, watching his life ebb away among the soap suds and scrubbing brushes.

When Emmett moans about his fate or  bad luck, Dressler tells him to basically shut up and create beauty with a dirty plate filled with the remnants of creme brûlée.

Essex has been on the stage now for half a century as singer and actor. He had that great MOR song Rock O’ many eons ago which made him a shedload of cash; he was on the West End stage in various guises; and  made a splash in the film That’ll Be The Day with Ringo all those decades ago.

You wouldn’t recognise the elfin face now. He is late middle age (67) and plays the part of the philosopher/dishwashing taskmaster perfectly. I have doubts, though, about his ability to pitch his voice in the cavern known as The Rep and others agreed some of his gnomic lines were garbled.

But the script, by Canadian writer Morris Panych is sharp, funny and full of pungent counterpunches. The set by Matthew Wright, all dinge, grime and dirt, is perfect in its cruddiness.

There is  good solid acting by Rik Makarem as the whizkid Emmett hitting the skids and old RSC warhorse Andrew Jarvis as the ancient rambling  fool who imagines he is somewhere else.

But I have to say, I wonder if The Rep has it right in launching their post-panto season with this moody three hander with its hints of Pinter, its touches of Beckett, its colour of melancholia

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