ZingW

Playhouse, London
The actor best known as Chandler Bing returns to the London stage with a self-written confessional drama that feels like an extended sitcom

Matthew Perry is a likable actor who brings with him a fund of goodwill from his 10-year stint as Chandler Bing in Friends. In writing, and starring in, his first play he has stuck closely to the format of the TV series: short scenes, smart lines, characters trying to make sense of their relationships. But what works in half-hour bites on television looks decidedly thin on the stage.

Perry doesn’t waste any time on exposition. He simply has his four characters come on and announce their defining characteristics. Jack (Perry) is an alcoholic. Stephanie (Jennifer Mudge) bluntly announces “I’m a whore”, though one who charges $2,500 an hour. Meanwhile her friend Stevie (Christina Cole) works in pharmaceuticals and Joseph (Lloyd Owen) simply declares that he’s stupid.

What suspense there is lies in seeing whether the surprise bonding of Joseph and Stevie will help Jack and Stephanie turn their own mutual attraction into a lasting relationship. If Friends is one influence, another is David Mamet’s steely quadrille, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, in which Perry starred on the London stage in 2003.

But, where Mamet’s play showed a central couple at the mercy of their vampirical friends, Perry irons out the contradictions in his characters, who change but never really develop. Each has a single, dominant quality which remains unexplored. How, you wonder, does the permanently stewed Jack hold down a job as a top photographer, and how does Stephanie so blithely brush aside the complications of being a sex worker?

Set chiefly in bars and bedrooms, the play also sidesteps dramatic possibilities: typically you hear about, but never see, an embarrassing family reunion in which Stephanie takes Jack home to meet her middle-class parents.

Given Perry’s well-documented, and happily conquered, period of addiction, the play feels at times like a piece of confessional therapy: when the audience applauds Jack’s climactic account of confronting his personal demons, you are not quite sure whether they are cheering the character or the actor. Perry, with his permanent stubble and greying hair, is certainly a beguiling presence and generously gives his character most of the play’s best lines: at one point he declares that, having been awake for several days, “I finally fell asleep during a Rolling Stones concert.” But good lines alone don’t make a play and not even Perry’s laidback, Jack Nicholson-style delivery can lend depth to a professional drunk.

The women have even less chance to dig below the surface but Mudge as the happy hooker and Cole as the neurotic Stevie do what they have to with a certain style. In many ways, the most interesting character is Joseph whose supposed dumbness conceals a laconic wit and whom Owen invests with a stumbling charm.

Lindsay Posner directs with his customary efficiency and, although the design makes no great demands on Anna Fleischle, she creates a chic urban playground. But, while the play clearly aims to deal with four loners struggling to come to terms with early middle-age, it feels more like an extended sitcom in which there is little going on behind the lines.

• At the Playhouse, London, until 14 May. Box office: 0844-871 7627.

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