The Gift | Park Theatre| ★★★☆☆
The Gift opens with a simple premise: Colin, our leading man, has received a poo in the post. And he doesn’t know who from.
It’s a problem unusual enough to be grabbing, yet not too outlandish as to be farcical. (As it happens, the boss of British Gas reported having excrement delivered to his doorstep just a few years back.)
The rest of the play is a quotidian whodunnit, with Colin raking through his past to try and figure out who could possibly have the means and, crucially, the motive to do such a thing. Lisa, his no-nonsense sister, and Brian, the ‘bantering’ brother-in-law, are taken along for the ride.
It’s a gag which could very easily be derailed by an overserving of toilet humour. Thankfully, writer Dave Florez knows how to restrain himself (bar a few open goals he’d be remiss not to use – the play is a literal “shitshow”, as one character reminds us). The action takes place in one pretty uninspiring set – a modern, greige open-plan kitchen – but there is enough plot to keep you engaged.
Middle-aged, middle-class and intemperate, Colin (Nicholas Burns) is something of an anti-hero. When forced to think who could possibly have it in for him, he doesn’t struggle to come up with around 50 contenders, from an employee he made redundant to a boy he spread rumours about at uni. Sloping around the stage almost perpetually in his pyjamas, he starts off too much of a man-child to be immediately sympathetic, but is witty enough to get the audience to root for him by the end.
His brother-in-law Brian (Alex Price) has a similar likeability trajectory. I found myself going through the same motions as Colin towards him (irritation to slightly touched at the end), a shift which is presumably intentional. All is helped along mightily by Laura Haddock’s dry, unsentimental Lisa, whose cutting humour perfectly offsets Colin’s erraticness. It’s a character very much of the Claire from Fleabag formula – the responsible older sister forced to drop her put-together exterior to muck in with family shenanigans.
The show is unabashedly fun and silly, though it reaches for depth at moments. Male loneliness, the scourge of overthinking and the overriding question of what we should do with the past – accept it or reckon with it – are all gestured to. The real heart of the play though lies in the at times earnest exploration of mundane life. Brian’s defence of one mislanded joke – “as a respite from the tedium of our tiny lives!” – is one that resonates. Why else, after all, in a cold and rainy January, do we go to the theatre?
The Gift is playing at the Park Theatre from 22 Jan to 1 March