Review: Tom, Dick & Harry

Tom, Dick & Harry by Ray Cooney
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

As the lights went down for the interval, I turned to my companion and simply mouthed, "Wow." This play is simply awful. Of course, it didn't help that one of the actors was hopeless and the direction was a little pedestrian; a decent script could survive that. But farce only works with an element of plausibility, and this one depends on people making ludicrous, idiotic decisions that nobody with an IQ in double figures would make.

Tom and Linda are awaiting a visit from Mrs Potter to assess whether they are suitable to adopt a baby. Tom's brother Dick has borrowed Tom's van ostensibly to help a friend move house but has instead gone to Calais to load up with cigarettes, brandy and, unwittingly, two Albanian refugees. That's plausible enough and a good basis for a farce.

But Harry? He plans to help Tom and Linda buy their rented flat. He steals some body parts from the hospital so he can bury them in the garden, turning the flat into a murder scene and knocking £100,000 off the asking price. Easy enough: hospitals always leave dismembered cadavers in corridors for anyone to walk off with and would never notice if they sent a body for cremation minus its head and limbs. And why would an absentee landlord suddenly decide to sell at a loss when he has reliable, paying tenants? And why would Tom let Harry bring body parts into the flat on such an important day?

When Mrs Potter arrives to a house is full of dead bodies, and occasional policeman and live, drunk refugees (but not Tom's wife Linda, who has been tricked into going out), she offers to postpone their interview. To which any vaguely sane person would reply, "How about next Wednesday?" Instead, Tom insists the interview goes ahead and concocts the most idiotic story imaginable to explain the situation.

With farce, one has to sympathise with the main protagonist, but it's impossible to sympathise with Tom. He could have solved his problems at almost every turn: with a simple "Yes" to Mrs Potter and a simple "F*** off out of my flat" to Harry, Dick and the refugees. Every situation offers an easy escape that Tom refuses to take.

Like Alan Ayckbourn, Cooney is a staple of AmDram and his comedies have that cosy, 1970s feel (with social attitudes to match). Tom, Dick & Harry was written in 2005 and is a bit more modern, but there's still a whiff of the 70s about it. That's what will keep it running in Village Halls for decades, or at least till the Morecambe & Wise generation have shuffled off.

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Review: Familiar

Familiar by J. Robert Lennon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If Robert Lennon looks more bald than in his earlier PR shots, it's probably through tearing his hair out reading reviews like many of those here, decrying that he has failed to create a linear narrative that comes to a clear conclusion. "But what happens in the end?" they fume. To ask the question is to miss the point. (Besides, Lennon does provide an ending – at least a possible one – on the penultimate page. But it's all in brackets and isn't the final word, so presumably that's not good enough. I'd question whether he even needs to give his readers that much.)

In Familiar, Elisa slips into an alternative reality where everything is the same but slightly different: her son Sam has failed to emerge from his brother's malignant shadow, she and husband Derek aren't having affairs (a creepy therapist is now the interloper), her job has changed and a woman she despised is now her best friend. Oh, and her son Silas hasn't spent the last ten years dead.

The title, of course, is a play on words, because the sci-fi plot is a device to tackle the real issue in Elisa's life: how to make sense of her spectacularly dysfunctional family. Her existential crisis exists in both universes, only in a different form. One is drawn to the conclusion that the answer to the question 'where did I go wrong?' is that it doesn't matter. What was wrong was always you. If you didn't make this cock-up you'd have made a different one. You might have taken a different route you took to your personal disaster and hurt different people along the way, but the result is the same. Silas's survives at the cost of Sam's psychological collapse.

Lennon could point his detractors to something Silas says in one of his posts to a gaming newsgroup, "Designers are stuck on the notion of story. Life is inherently nonsensical. Drawing strands of meaning together is for idiots."

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Build Your Reputation, neglect your job

Build Your Reputation: Grow Your Personal Brand for Career and Business Success by Rob Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bear in mind that most books like this are written by people with enough vision, insight and intelligence to have forged careers that enabled them to get their books published. If you’re stuck in a dead-end job, the chances are that you’re just not capable of these things, so the value of the advice is limited.

This is a book of two halves: the first is utter tosh; by the time I’d finished reading it I had already crafted an excoriating review, so I was a little disappointed that the second half showed a marked improvement.

It starts inauspiciously: “This playbook will propel you quickly to the top of your tree.” Such an implausible claim immediately puts the reader on guard. And what on earth is a ‘playbook’? Brown never uses the simple word ‘book’, so this distinction is clearly important to him. Oxford Dictionaries Online defines a playbook as: “NOUN, North American: A book containing a sports team's strategies and plays, especially in American football.”

My limited understanding of American Football is that the ‘plays’ are carefully structured manoeuvres lasting a few seconds at most. I can’t think of anything less appropriate as a metaphor for building a long-term reputation. And by rooting his imagery in a sport only played in his own country, he comes across as insular and parochial.

So we can ignore Chapter 1. Chapter 2 covers what a reputation actually is, and is so obvious that it can also be skipped. Chapter 3 describes what a career is, which again is glaringly obvious. It also contains the statement: “That’s why need a ticket to the game,” which is a terrible mistake in any book but especially one concerned with reputation. Attention to detail is important. Later on he urges you to look for “uniqueness in your core competences. That means any ‘me too’ comparisons that make you indistinguishable from your rivals”. If this drivel means anything, then it means the opposite of what the author wants to say.

Having accurately described the different kinds of fulfilment, Brown then states: “However you define the prize, only a few can lay their hands on it … Few people ever attain the power and satisfaction of a work-life dictated by their own choices and ambitions.” This is clearly nonsense. The world is full of people enjoying fulfilling careers. Believe it or not, it is possible to be satisfied without becoming a CEO and having your own private helicopter.

After a lot of exhorting and explaining the obvious, a fifth of the way through we get the first piece of practical advice. It’s not original. It’s the title of another book. But even that isn’t original. It’s a quote from comedian Steve Martin: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Got that? Great. Go out and do it. Just in case it never occurred to you that being good at your job might be the path to advancement.

Nearly a third of the way through the book, we’re still evaluating, looking for a starting point. If you’re going to improve your reputation, you need to find out what that reputation is now. Fair point. How do you go about that? Brown’s solution is simple: ask people. Just like Lieutenant Scheisskopf in Catch-22, asking his cadets if he’s doing anything wrong:

“I won’t punish you,” Lieutenant Scheisskopf swore.
“He says he won’t punish me,” said Clevinger.
“He’ll castrate you,” said Yossarian.
“I swear I won’t punish you,” said Lieutenant Scheisskopf. “I’ll be grateful to the man who tells me the truth.”
“He’ll hate you,” said Yossarian. “To his dying day he’ll hate you.”

But let’s say you’re a poor unfortunate cursed with colleagues who tell him the truth. You now know your Unique Value Proposition. How do you turn value into reputation? Brown has a clever strategy: “Communicate it.”

And that’s the real problem with the first half of this book. It doesn’t really go beyond saying, “Be brilliant and make sure people know about it,” without giving much practical advice.

But part two has a lot of practical advice – perhaps too much. To do everything the author says you should do isn’t just a full-time job; you’d have to hire staff. For instance, one of his “small, achievable goals” is to make ten phone calls before 10am, three days a week.

All this might build your reputation up, but it could be a reputation as a badgering, needy annoyance, while your colleagues only see someone who is transparently searching for their next job while neglecting their current one.

But Brown is right when he says that you need a plan and you need to be disciplined. Some of the strategies are unrealistic for anyone who isn’t already successful, but if you have the clarity of thought and the discipline to carry your plans out, then part two of this book could be a real help. If you’re a bit of a failure but are motivated to do something about it, you’ll probably still be a failure, but you’ll fail better.

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Review: People

People by Alan Bennett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

People is characterised by Bennett's trademark northern humour: sharp, clever, occasionally arch and with considerable human warmth. It's also characterised by what in recent years has become his trademark sloppiness. Bennett wants to get certain gags in, and sometimes goes meandering off to collect every laugh possible regardless of whether the journey was worth it.

Laughs come thick and fast in the first 20 minutes, but they peter out into occasional chuckles as the interval draws near and the script's energy dissipates. The second quarter of the play needs a complete rewrite; I didn't learn much or laugh much, and my attention started to wander. It's possible that I nodded off. Whatever I missed didn't seem important because when the action really got going in the second half, it still made perfect sense.

And it's worth waiting for the second half. The making of the porn film is hilariously scripted with an Orton-like farcical energy, while the denouement is slyly satirical. Maybe three stars is harsh, but I'm getting a bit tired of Bennett publishing half-baked work and still being hailed as a genius.

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Review: Kindertransport

Kindertransport by Diane Samuels
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Worthy subjects do not good literature make. One feels a duty to like Kindertransport because of its subject matter, but it really isn't a great play. The dialogue is flat, especially in the first half, and the transformation from shy, polite Eva into repressed, cold Evelyn isn't convincing. Added to that is the character of the Ratcatcher, who prowls the stage with wordless menace but who isn't properly developed and whose allegorical significance is muted.

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