Interesting premise: suburban couple Brian and Alice’s sex life is severely impaired by Brian’s compulsion to imagine two children watching. Not theirs. He wants children but she’s not ready. These kids look like teenagers and behave like warped pre-pubescent nightmares, which they are. They’re Brian’s recurring nightmare.

The Girl is a happy-ever-after romantic fantasist; the Boy is an abusive control freak who nags at Brian about his short-comings and claims to love his little sister, succumbing to her tear-tantrums but threatening to kill her when he finds her in a sexually compromising position with Brian. As I say, interesting – or it would be if we ever gained some insight into how these creatures came to invade Brian’s psyche. But we don’t.

Compellingly played by Katrina Fleming and Jeremy Keene, the Girl and Boy at least seem rooted in some kind of truth, even if we never get to identify it. Unfortunately all the other characters are totally one-dimensional, which matters when their stories drag on for 100 minutes without an interval in a flat-floored auditorium with rock-hard plastic seats.   

Nick Zwart manages to make Brian credible as far as he goes but he is such an unrelenting no-hoper, so totally bland, so utterly devoid of the slightest notion of how to satisfy his wife even if he thought of that as the obvious antidote to his own self-defeating preoccupations, that it’s hard to invest in him or his dilemma. 

To be fair, he does finally confront and destroy the boy in a chivalrous act worthy of the naïve fairy tale epics the Girl is wont to write, but because I am completely lost as to the psychology behind his fantasies I can’t see this as catharsis and resolution. It’s just dramatic because suddenly he does something assertive. (I initially assumed they were the children he wanted but was scared of, and that may be the vestigial idea, but given the way it all goes it becomes less and less likely. The playwright needs to reward our investment and trust with some kind of revelation.)

Surprisingly for a play written and directed by a woman (Pachali Brewster), the adult women are also ciphers. Neither Alice (Mel Shaw) nor Marta (Sara Velásquez) have any dimension or life beyond being dissatisfied wives and would-be lesbian lovers. We are told, late in the piece, that Alice does "volunteer work for dolphins" but she does nothing in the play to validate that (whatever it is).

Part of the problem is that – in a production that lurches between live action that blends ‘reality’ with fantasy, and screen action that includes naturalistic human interaction, childlike animation (nicely done by Dan Brosnan) and a silent movie scene (all well filmed and designed by Emma Cullen) – it is hard to work out what are Brian’s fevered fantasies and what is supposed to happening in what passes for real life.

Some sense that we are engaging with some kind of truth at some level, regardless of the theatrical conventions being used, is pretty well a bottom line for anything more than a display of skills … And, for me, Lies and Other Stories Before Bed turns out to have no foundation, despite its interesting premise.

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