Only When I Laugh is Jack Shepherd’s song of love to the English variety bill. Set in Leeds in the days just before the wide diffusion of television sets killed the variety star, the play spans a typical day and night in the backstage of a variety theatre, whose main attraction has been (at least until this particular night) working-class-hero Reg Henson - a comedian who is known for his violent fits of rage and his tendency to destroy dressing rooms when he doesn’t get his way, played by a Jack Nicholson-esque Jim Bywater. But tonight the manager introduces someone new, a (insert mocking tone here) crooner lady, Janey Shore, who came all the way from London in a glamorous little black dress. Someone needs to tell Reg he will not have his usual Number 1 dressing-room, nor will he conclude the second act as dulcis in fundo.

At this point in the plot something slightly disconcerting happens, because Janey is quite happy to give up both the best dressing-room and the best performance slot, admitting that this is not her usual environment so she doesn’t quite mind. That does not stop Reg from making a scene (hence giving us the impression that he was simply intent to do so, without needing a pretext), and Janey will actually spend the evening helping Reg get over his drunk outburst (during which he destroys the infamous dressing-room - shame this is not shown on stage and we only see the results after the interval) and getting him ready for his act. Having somehow dismantled the climax he had started to build, Shepherd proceeds to extinguish all the other potential fires before they even get started. Comedian Sam Bolton is having an affair with a tap dancer, which becomes perfectly understandable when we see his tyrannical wife; yet he does not seem to care when the wife in question (the positively scary Loraine Metcalfe) assaults the dancer: a potential disaster dwindles into mostly nothing. An elderly lady from the local censorship committee is going to watch the show and spends the play trying to talk to Reg, only to manage finally to do so and give him a speech about the negative effects of vulgarity on the working classes. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t listen. So she gives up.

And this is basically it. Perhaps this lack of a narrative centre would be less perceivable if Reg, who is the core of the piece, were a thoroughly convincing character - but he is not really. For a man who believes himself to be the best thing that happened to proletariat since Marx, he is considerably spoiled and aloof. Surely if he had any respect for the work of others he wouldn’t torture the poor theatre manager with his prima donna tantrums? The censorship lady protests to him that he only makes people ‘aware of their own prejudice’, and compares their exit from the theatre to that of miners stumbling out of the pit, dazed and confused. But perhaps the most interesting remark comes from the handy-man who has to repair the destroyed dressing-room, and who compares Reg to ‘a safety valve on a dodgy boiler’, dispersing the rage gathered during the working week, while ‘perhaps what we need is for the boiler to go off’. While a passing expression on Bywater’s face makes us consider that perhaps Reg might give a thought or two to these opinions, he remains unshakable in his conviction that what he does is good and useful and just.

There are quite a few jokes, a naked entrance by Reg himself, and a couple of caricatures - Sam’s wife, but also the plastic-balloons man, played by John Giles, who appears a little silly but yet does have a touch of great tenderness, expressed in what is arguably one of the best scenes of the evening, when he confesses to Janey what he thinks about his talent. There is a particularly funny moment when Reg discovers his dressing-room filled with flowers (sent and arranged around for Janey, of course), and erupts in a ‘Fucking gladioli’. And there is quite a lot of insistence on genuineness and how people respond only to that, recognising those who are keeping it real, as Reg would put it if he were alive today - a concept that perhaps owes more to Oprah Winfrey than to social awareness.

The whole concept of the Music Hall, being an entertainment tradition that is characteristic of this country and that still influences the social perception of mainstream theatre, is very fascinating and interesting, particularly when (and this is a touring production) the play is staged in a working-class area like East London, a few minutes’ walk from the Victorian Hoxton Hall, which is still very much in business. What exactly are the connections (or lack thereof) between the kind of entertainment provided by the Music Hall and the one provided by television? How does the debate between Reg and the censorship committee woman compare to the debate between, say, reality TV producers versus people who spend their evenings at the National Theatre? There are many engaging ideas to think about while we watch this play, but all this richness is just put in front of us and left to its own devices. Without a clear rhythm and without a direction, this varied material does not quite come together, and the production ends up feeling like a collection of subjects that Shepherd cares about very, very much - but so much, in fact, that in his rush to tell us all about them he forgot to put a story behind them.

Till 2 May 2009