Brits Off Broadway: Red Sea Fish

When is deft writing not enough? When is fine acting little comfort? In Matt Wilkinson’s brand-new British import Red Sea Fish, there is plenty of competence on display, and yet, taken as a whole, the package tastes overwhelmingly stale. Instead of surprise and truth, Fish stinks of obvious imagery (a father who’s allergic to light sucks vampirically at his son), a wind-up plot (we don’t wonder if the son will break, only when) and a crippling debt to Harold Pinter. We have now seen so many of these claustrophobic British family psychodramas (just think of Enda Walsh’s output) that we’re finished the moment we see the plasticky couch and a lout reading his paper.

Ray (Blissett) never leaves his apartment: His skin can’t tolerate sun and his awkward son Terry (Houghton) provides him everything he needs. Terry vacuums around his pontificating ex-con dad, and then inevitably, fatefully invites a girl home. Will Karen (Fox) force Terry to switch allegiances? Readers, she will. Wilkinson’s dramaturgical architecture is depressingly prefab, but at least he decorates it well. He unrolls carpets of cant for his actors, sending Blissett into marvelous flights of filthy-mouthed world-weariness and threat. Sadly, the playwright (who has recently been writing for TV and film) has picked up some bad habits: The dialogue, crammed with dialect, is beautifully detailed but desperately in need of an editor. What’s worse, codirectors Wilkinson and McCabe allow a number of soggy pauses, making what’s long seem longer. The only hope for something so derivative is to whip it past us, dazzling us with speed. Given long pauses, though, we hear its gears grinding more than we ever hear the play.—Helen Shaw

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