The Stage

Piano/Forte

Published Friday 22 September 2006 at 14:00 by Gerald Berkowitz

Terry Johnson’s over-the-top melange of gothic soap opera ingredients includes a few tantalising hints that it’s all meant as parody - but this hope is extinguished by the general seriousness of even its openly comic sequences.

The adult daughters of an Archer-esque celebrity politician have both been emotionally crippled by his coldness and their mother’s long-ago suicide, the one turned into an agoraphobic near-zombie and the other driven to promiscuous and self-destructive mania. Father’s wedding to a new trophy wife reunites the family, as the wild daughter does all she can to disrupt the event and spread unhappiness as widely as she can.

Much of this is funny, almost all of it outrageous, very little of it emotionally involving. Any time any one of the central characters is allowed a moment of humanity, he or she is quickly turned back into a cartoon, and by the time we get to the Spanish pornographic aerial ballet, the Hitchcockian birds, the charges of actual or wished-for incest and the hints - which go nowhere - that one of the sisters is actually a Fight Club-like projection of the other, an exhausted audience can just surrender to the shotgun - and, yes, there is eventually an actual shotgun - nature of the excess.

Alicia Witt as the quiet sister just mopes and stammers, though Kelly Reilly does capture the sadness in a woman working so desperately hard at being offensive. Oliver Cotton does an adequate Archer imitation and Danny Webb plays unobtrusive straight man.