Barry, Pull Your Finger Out!

Good guy Barry fancies generic girl Suzie, but she's going out with try-hard Gary, much to her own confusion. As the narrator asks, with the babbling urgency of a Fringe show promoter, "Are Barry and Gary two peas from the same pod? Are they in pods? Are they even peas?!"

ne would expect there to have been more to this, the winner of the 2009 Harry Porter Prize.. Yet everything about the play is simple, including the three-part stage equipped with sink, table and sofa. The characters are similarly bog-standard, from Gary, who seems to be mimicking James Corden, to budding novelist Barry, the embodiment of every stereotypical twenty-something male student. The girls are there for little more than diversity's sake. This was not meant for the stage: tidy it up and it is a television pilot for BBC3.

The play is saved from complete banality by a narrating, besuited Cupid. With childlike glee, he bursts on stage and derides the characters' foolishness. He is a wonderfully fresh eccentric but criminally underused; and although his presence is very much appreciated (livening an otherwise vapid show), his appearances are so few and far between that in the end he seems fairly pointless.

Having actors so committed with a decent knack for comic timing, it seems a pity the jokes could not have been more sophisticated. Unremarkable and unoriginal, there is a feeling that it is not Barry who should have pulled his finger out, but the writer.