Say It Again, Sam @ Sweet

Say It Again, Sam is a live-action film noir that takes directly from the screen all the tropes you would associate with the genre: half-lighting, fedoras, private detectives, a femme fatale and even on-screen film credits and voiceover narration. A combination of all these things in the play's opening moments is a promising start. However, it does not live up to the expectations incited by this preamble.

There is a point when following the tropes of a particular genre so exactly becomes too much; too stereotyped to look like anything more than a copy. This is the unfortunate downfall of Say It Again, Sam. It is most reflected in the dialogue, which tries too hard for film noir status and ends up tripping over itself, entering cliché too many times for it to pass as coincidence. Which is a shame, because the promising foundations are there underneath it all. The acting and the characters also enter too far into the world of stereotype to have any real depth. Many of the bids for humour end up undermining the image they are tying to create of Edinburgh's seedy underbelly, and instead border on the farcical.

There's no denying that there are humorous moments and lines, but without something else to the characters it becomes parody more than a serious story, which doesn't appear to have been the intention. The two leads - Sam and The Woman - do their best to hold it all together, and their performances are strong. It is just a shame that they do not have the material in place to support them.