So Close to Home

Published Thursday 17 April 2008 at 11:40 by Natasha Tripney

Restaurant kitchens are tense places. Temperatures are high and the hours are unsociable. More businesses fail than succeed. So it’s easy to see why Mark Wheatley chose to set this inter-generational drama in such a potentially volatile environment.

After years of working in other people’s kitchens, Robert is finally opening his own place. He had hoped to run it with his son Sean, but Sean has other ideas, preferring to take an ethically dubious job organising night porters and pot-washers - or ‘galley slaves’ and ‘dish pigs’ as they’re apparently known in the trade - many of whom are illegal immigrants. On top of this, as Robert prepares the place for opening, his own estranged father Martin arrives on the scene, having absconded to America many years before.

Wheatley paints a convincing picture of what life in the catering business entails - the hard work, the rivalries. But the play is at its most interesting when examining the relationships between these three very different men bound only by blood. Unfortunately, he devotes just as much time to an unnecessarily convoluted subplot about Sean’s dealings with the immigrant workers.

At more thn two hours, Paul Higgins’ production feels rather overstretched and, though it contains a couple of dramatically potent moments and some decent performances from the cast, it too often descends into three men shouting at each other.