Park Theatre, til 1 March 2025

⭐⭐

Poo-dunnit has a few decent gags but limited appeal.

I’ve become a bit of a regular at the Park Theatre, just round the corner from Finsbury Park station. It has a pretty interesting range of plays (I’ve previously enjoyed Bitter Lemons and When it Happens to You) and small, intimate theatre spaces, meaning the nosebleeds aren’t quite as bloody-nosed as normal! Described as a “neighbourhood theatre”, it’s actually a not-for-profit with a pretty cool ethos of supporting minority and emerging voices. So even when I see a play I don’t enjoy as much, like The Gift, I’m happy to have spent my evening (and money) at the Park Theatre. (Plus it only takes me about 20 minutes to get home, which might be worth half a star in itself!)

Written by Dave Florez and directed by Adam Meggido, The Gift is a comedy with a simple premise: a man gets a shit in a box delivered to his front door and it triggers his mental breakdown. The man in question is Colin, a (deliberately) not-very-likeable ad man in his 40s with a slew of neuroses. As he gets more and more frantic trying to identify the mystery sender, watching on with despair are his tightly-wound sister Lisa and her blokey husband Brian (also Colin’s pal from university). 

When I told some colleagues about this play on Monday morning, one said “well, it’s an inherently funny idea.” Which I suppose is true, but it’s a joke that really doesn’t have that much comedic mileage. There are only so many times you can laugh at a poo pun, and the shock value wears off pretty quickly. There are plenty of other gags in this play too, and some of them definitely funny, but there are too few moments of real laugh-out-loud enjoyment to make the whole thing worthwhile. The show relies too heavily on the shoutiness of its performers to eke humour out of sub-par material (such as an extensive rant about how to slag people off in office emails, which starts in a funny place but drags on for far too long). It feels as though there are several amateur stand-up routines shoe-horned into parts of the show, with awkward lines being revealed as set-ups for jokes that are hit-and-miss.

It’s hard to judge comedy – what I find underwhelming others might find sidesplitting. The Gift seems to have gotten plenty of decent reviews, so maybe I’m out-of-step with the critical consensus on this one. But I will say that the crowd for my performance didn’t appear to be loving it; the response wasn’t as muted as when I saw the disappointing The Government Inspector last year, but there weren’t many moments of true hilarity and some gags definitely got missed by the audience altogether. 

I think part of the problem might be that outside the middling humour, there isn’t much else to keep you interested in The Gift. As a poo-dunnit (if you hate me for that pun, reflect on the fact it’s an actual line from the play itself) it doesn’t really work because there are no suspects – we’ve only got three people to work with, and a whole lot of allusions to off-stage characters we never get to meet. Of course it’s not really meant to be a mystery, but even comedy stories need, well, a story, and I don’t think The Gift presents a particularly compelling one. I think we’re supposed to be following a character arc for Colin, but it’s hard to be invested when he’s so unlikeable, and seemingly so neurotic that the mental breakdown doesn’t really present much deviation from his character anyway. There’s also an attempt at a b-story for Lisa and Brian, with their relationship clearly on the rocks in act one, but the resolution happens entirely during the intermission. There are only a few lines later on alluding to the successful couples’ retreat they’ve been on (between acts) before fairytale happy endings are dished out to all at the play’s conclusion.

Another issue for me, though I hesitate to mention it on the grounds it might be a little on the personal side (who am I kidding – no-one involved is reading this!), is that I found the casting . . . questionable. The cast is broadly fine – it’s not a hard script to deliver. But I kept getting distracted by the fact that Colin and Lisa, meant to be siblings, are clearly quite a few years apart in age. Googling reveals actors Nicholas Burns and Laura Haddock have eight years between them, which is not implausible for a brother-sister pair – except that there are constant references to Colin and Brian’s university years, which sort of suggests the whole gang are meant to be part of the same peer group. Of course when it comes to male and female leads being cast with unlikely age gaps, this ranks pretty lowly on the list of terrible choices. But it was rather jarring!

I hovered between two and three stars for this review, once again lamenting my own laziness for not investigating how to make a half-star emoji. I definitely laughed at a few jokes and I’m not pretending otherwise. But when comparing The Gift to some of the other plays I’ve given three stars and quite enjoyed (like Skeleton Crew, or Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder) I just didn’t think it lived up to the mark.

Visit the Park Theatre website for tickets to The Gift.