Dean's Dad's Ducks is a one-man trip down memory lane with Dean Parkin, told from the comfort of a train seat and punctuated by crackly announcements from the train porter. Parkin touches on fatherhood, truth, lies, affairs, secrets, poetry and the fates of 30,000 rubber ducks lost at sea. It is a gentle, golden-hearted, but long-winded and bone dry affair, like an Alan Bennett 'Talking Head' without the dark undercurrents or minimalist poetry. The musical poems are laboured, especially the one about the lemon tree, and the humour throughout is flat, limp and too genteel for its own good ('that was a Yorkshire accent, not a French one'; 'I think I've caught his cough'). There are moments of pathos and I liked the concept of poetry and lying as twin blends of truth and imagination, but the whole show has the tiresome harmlessness of an overly familiar fellow passenger, the self-conscious acknowledgments of false details are increasingly grating (he's not bloody Cervantes) and I found his reactions to the tannoy particularly annoying. This is a profoundly personal show and a touching tribute to a colourful father figure, but it is too safe and old-fashioned to be much more. Perfectly nice, but a bit dull.
