The Nunnery

Hen and Chickens

Natasha Hulugalle

Even the most uninterested observer will instantly recognise this portrayal of a private rehab clinic popular with various tired and emotional A to Z list celebrities.

There are occasional flashes of insight in The Nunnery, particularly the notion that overpriced treatment centres offering alternative remedies and banal New Age homilies unlock more demons and human neuroses than they cure; however this point was too frequently obscured. Playwright Clive Evans appears to muddle his priorities in exposing the hypocrisies that this type of treatment can provoke.

Nevertheless the two actresses (Claire Gordon and Sarah Louise Young), who both played several characters each, have to be applauded for the sheer stamina of their performances. As well as playing the matriarchal Dr Lush and her sidekick Nurse, they continued to parade energetically the patients/addicts of their unique establishment - The Nunnery. It is necessary to praise the performers in this respect as the characters depicted were a disappointingly obvious collection of cultural stereotypes. We were offered the ageing American blonde ex-supermodel, the oppressed, tragi-comic Irish housewife, the tough yet vulnerable Claire Shortesque government minister, and so on.

All were delivered with exaggerated accents, some more successful than others, (assuming Dr Lush to be a caricature of Janet Street Porter, it was not until the interval that I discovered she was actually Australian). Alcoholism provided the main addiction of choice, the one exception being a case of sex addiction. Again it felt too obvious and lacking in sophistication when it emerged that the root causes of the patients' addictions were the various men in their lives.

Herein lies the problem with The Nunnery: it appears heavy-handed and overdone in all the wrong places. In the first instance, the hysteria of the female patients rose to needlessly deafening levels. There was a sense of how modern methods of rehabilitation can disguise a basic irresponsible quackery, but the emphasis was often misplaced. The idea that treatments that are pursued with an evangelical fervour in the name of some greater rehabilitative pet project usually having little to do with curing the addicted was not addressed as fully as the title of the play promised.

There were some genuinely poignant moments as some patients found ultimate salvation from their problems through suicide and alcohol-induced death. These were made a little bizarre however by the baffling and consistently uproarious laughter of the audience. At the end of the performance I felt like the token 'nice' one from the panel of judges on Pop Idol/Stars/Rivals: 'That took a lot of guts… but it's a difficult song to pull off…'.

Given this analogy it seems appropriate to mention that a highlight of the play came when one character played by Young belted out Dolly Parton's Jolene. Here I happily joined in with the enthusiasm of the audience.

Till 15 February.