Hampstead Theatre, London NW3
There is a powerful poignancy in watching a child's hope morph into an adult's disappointment. But poignancy is a quality conspicuously absent from Alexis Zegerman's comedy.
Inspired by Seven Up!, the television series that famously documented the lives of several people from their childhood, this cleverly constructed play leaps back and forth between its characters' early adulthood and middle-age.
The action is set in a cavernous TV studio where upper-class Catherine (Susannah Harker), middle-class archivist Tom (Jonny Weir), and Alan (David Kennedy), a working-class Jewish knicker salesman from the East End, wait for their god-like director to turn up.