Angry Young Man

Published Wednesday 16 January 2008 at 12:30 by Nuala Calvi

Ben Woolf’s prize-winning play makes a deserved transfer to the West End, reminding us why his MahWaff company is a comedic force to be reckoned with.

The jaunty, hour-long ride tells the tale of Yuri, a hapless Eastern European surgeon newly-arrived in London, whose misadventures begin the moment he steps off the plane and realises the “malicious hoax” behind the location of Stansted.

His tumbling progress through our green and pleasant land exposes it as one in which liberals and racists are to be feared in equal measure - and attitudes to immigrants make as much sense as the quacking ducks in the local park.

Four crisply-besuited young actors toss characters between them with jugglers’ deftness, sometimes in formation, sometimes relay, always leaving the audience breathless with laughter. Their sense of ensemble is formidable, and nodded to with a nice turn from Hugh Skinner as the put upon cast member, bullied into playing doors, dogs, and poorly-endowed cherubs.

The best joke is the disparity between the narrator Yuri’s newly-acquired, grandiose English - which has him “prosecuting” doorbells and waxing lyrical about “bucolic milkmen wending their way through country lanes” - and the stuttering Slavic nonsense which comes out of the actual Yuri’s mouth.

Perhaps Woolf intends his own narrative - a rather directionless meandering whipped into knowing melodrama by its outlandish characters - to function in the same way.

But a little more story in the telling would give his obvious stylistic genius a stronger backbone.