This production is very clever in some respects, and surprisingly dense in others. The action consists of a dinner party where the two bored hosts set out to confuse and distress their pair of guests as much as possible, like wind-up merchants on cocaine.The central conceit is a joke taken too far – the hosts claim they've killed the titular Kolpert as soon as their guests arrive, and hidden him in a locked trunk centre-stage. This elegantly obvious ploy gets extended ad (et ultra) absurdum as offhand comments and one-liners accumulate, in the vein of ‘we killed Mr Kolpert... only joking! But actually we did.’ It's especially nice because, though we have the extra knowledge that Sarah and Ralph (for so the hosts are named) are trying to disturb their guests, we still don't know whether or not they're lying.It's pleasantly, teasingly uncomfortable for a while, but the black social humour centred around the maybe-corpse sits oddly alongside the 'look how awkward this is!' comedy, manifested most often in everybody sitting silently fidgeting until somebody in the audience laughs to break the tension. Though a frantic failure to order pizza properly would make a nice sketch, it doesn't gel very well with the rest.Performances are an entertaining mixture of calm naturalism (courtesy of Roseanna Frascona's Sarah) and manic absurdism (Oliver Lavery and Timothy Allsop, Ralph and Bastian respectively), which hold up the play as far as it can go. Unfortunately this isn't especially far, as the style and core conceit are insufficient to hold interest for the duration. The occasional, incongruous employment of 'wacky' props to elicit a different kind of bizarre humour did little to remedy the slump.
