Beau Jest

Published Monday 12 May 2008 at 10:45 by Gerald Berkowitz

In eighties Chicago, a Jewish woman hires an actor to play the nice Jewish doctor boyfriend her parents expect her to have. You can write the rest of the play yourself - nervous beginnings, near-disastrous slips of the mask, panicky improvisation, the need to carry the imposture through a second and even third meeting and, of course, the couple actually falling in love.

James Sherman’s play never deviates from the rom-com conventions and doesn’t find a great deal new to explore within them, so at its best it manages to generate about as many chuckles as three or four episodes of a weak TV sitcom. Its best comic moments come when the gentile actor dips into his memory of appearing in Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret to come up with convincing bits of Yiddishkeit, while its weakest stretch is the author’s attempt to insert the obligatory tug at the heartstrings when the daughter comes clean and her parents prove more adaptable than she expected.

Lara Pulver is given little to do as the daughter but look panicked through most of the play, though Adam Rayner has moments as the actor surprises himself with his improvisations. Sue Kelvin and Jack Chissick play the thoroughly stereotyped parents with easy mastery. Susie McKenna directs with no real evocation of either the mounting franticness of farce or the sexual energy of romantic comedy.