Weaving an artful web

The Charing Cross Theatre has followed the trends of performance art for more than a century. It used to be a music hall. Then it put in a stint as a cinema. Now it’s a small theatre and it specialises in experimental comedies.

The Man on her Mind fits the bill nicely. It opens with Nellie, a sexy young book editor, being seduced in her one-bedroom flat by her handsome lover. There’s a knock on the door. The lover hides in the bathroom. In comes Nellie’s horrible sister, Janet, and she — surprise, surprise — needs the bathroom. She goes in and the lover is discovered. But no. The lover isn’t discovered. The lover doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of Nellie’s imagination.

Janet knows all about her sister’s psychological fetish and she’s determined to exorcise the ghost by fixing Nellie up with a real man. He’s called Leonard. So Nellie and Leonard meet. And guess what? Leonard has an imaginary lover too. Coincidence? You bet. The pair become romantically entangled and each conceives a jealous dislike of the other’s fictional companion. Then the fictional companions meet, too, in a rather vague location, and they agree to form a weird spiritual union.

The plot’s symmetrical neatness is brought to perfection by the witty detail that Leonard is a professional ghost-writer. And this is where the whole effort falls to pieces. The playwright, Alan Hruska, has created a diagram rather than a drama. Lovingly and with exquisite care, he has built a plot with all the pleasing harmonies of Euclidian geometry and none of the roughness and unpredictability of real life. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for two characters whose emotional capital is vested in a phantasm. And inevitably, one’s interest drifts towards the sane characters, Janet and her husband.