The show starts (after a song) with 'once upon a time' and ends with 'happily ever after', which is pretty indicative of the standard of writing on display. Sandwiched between these stalest of loaf-ends is the marginally more inventive story of a mentally ill fantasy writer losing his grip on reality in favour of the universe he has created.In the real world he is cared for at home by a psychiatrist and his ex-missionary sister. The domestic scenes are stronger than the author's fantastical hallucinations, managing to sculpt a functional and believable dynamic. Tom Walsh, who plays the author, is given the best of a weak script in the form of frequent and scathing one-liners, which amused but never prompted actual laughter. The scattergun philosophising brought about by the protagonist's illness and his sister's wavering faith sometimes glimmer faintly, but too much is grasped for at once and nothing sufficiently developed.The writing flags most severely in scenes where fantasy intrudes upon the real. Given that a key facet of the protagonist's personality is that he's a multi-million-selling author, his imagined world is astoundingly naff. The bargain-basement-Boromir outfit sported by gruff hero Underthorn epitomises the impoverished Lord of the Rings aesthetic which sustains this stodgy fiction. Aside from 'a dragon's coming and we ought to kill it' there is little in the way of motive or plot in the author's hallucinations, which could have been a real treasure-trove of creativity for a playwright.This needn't have mattered too much if the hallucinations had gelled better with the rest of the play - overlapping levels of perception make for great theatre - but the transitions and interactions were unsubtle and ham-fisted. Visions were ended in screaming or confusion, using the hallucinator's mental condition as an easy dramaturgical get-out.If I seem a little hung up on the writing, it's because it inhibits everything else. All the actors gave competent performances, especially for the first performance in the space. At times they could cover for the inadequacy of their material, but that's impossible to sustain.Even though it's early days, with the script it's got I really can't see Chasing Dragons chasing anything but it's own tail for the next month.
