Whatever I saw immediately after
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was going to have
a tough act to follow, but this is going from the sublime to the ridiculous: Going
from a seemingly unlimited budget to zero budget isn't necessarily a bad thing, some
of my favourite shows have been in rooms above pubs, including this one. But going
from a script carefully crafted by experts to a confused vanity project is something
else entirely: Journalist Simon Blow's first, and hopefully last play,
The Past
is a Tattooed Sailor is based on his own youth and real experiences with an
elderly relative (in fact the publicity has been so keen to point out it's about
Bright Young Thing Stephen Tennant that I'm not sure why he bothered to change the
names.) Upper-class but orphaned and now penniless, Joshua (Jojo Macari) discovers
he still has a wealthy relative, his great-uncle Napier (Bernard O'Sullivan,) who
had a colourful youth and now lives in a crumbling country house reliving it from
his bed.
