I’m tempted to offer this production the amount of respect it gives its audience and say – as its characters keep saying to each other – “it’s a fucking retard” and leave it at that. But then I’d also get abused for not doing my job. So …

When in doubt, consider the title. There’s a character called Steve (Bray Croft), who collects cigarette lighters (his box is labelled LITAS), most of which don’t work. One is pink. It’s called Millicent. Fran (Chanel Turner), the girl next door, has it. I’m not sure but I think it might be the quest to retrieve the lighter that tries to drive the plot through a plethora of irrelevancies.

Fran lives with Jack (Phillip White) who is a fantasist, role playing as a gun-toting ‘Super Jack’.  He is also a compulsive wanker, whose most intimate and fulfilling relationship is with his right hand, which he adorns with plastic eyes and calls Shazza. Jack and Shazza both shout a lot. And Jack keeps baring his bum at the audience. Should we feel insulted?

Steve lives with couch potato Lance (Patrick Graham, who also directs), whose play station takes him, and those willing to kowtow to him, to “the forbidden mutant lab”. Nina (Charlotte Blacklock), is also a flatmate. She spends most of the time telling both men what retards they are when they aren’t mindlessly insulting each other. Later she is grossed out when she discovers Lance uses “nina” as his password to some secret site.

Meanwhile this trio decides, amid a jumble of meaningless dialogue, to sneak up on the neighbours – Fran and Jack – who have taken a sudden break from being totally dysfunctional and are getting it on in the kitchen. This leads to their coming out to investigate the intruders, Nina clocking Fran unconscious (with a clock) and Steve running away while Jack ties Nina and Lance up in Fran’s laundry.

Apparently he has been having another ‘episode’ while doing this. An anatomically correct (if enormous) dildo has made an appearance early on and ‘out in the street’ but it goes nowhere. Jack, however, jerks off in Lance’s ear then tries to wipe it off with a pair of soiled underpants.

Jack tries to perve on supine Fran’s bits to prove to himself he’s not gay. When she wakes up, she comes on to him like a nymphomaniac. Something to do with the pink lighter? Maybe that’s why he throws up when they get to the laundry, to complete the trifecta of bodily emissions.

They girls trade “skanky bitch” insults then suddenly are molesting each other, which also leads nowhere. The punchline is – should I put a spoiler warning here? – that “The lighter has gone; it has no spark.” The same cannot be said for the play, or this production of it: it was a dud from the start.

The actors show great commitment. The women make their warped roles as credible as possible and Blacklock is clearly a gifted comedienne. The small second night audience was largely silent throughout and managed to offer polite applause at the end.

If anyone can make greater sense of Pink Lighter (by Jonathan Riley), or rationalise it as a credible absurdist play, please do.

(Note: nonsensical ≠ absurdist. Absurdist plays take a logical premise to an absurd conclusion or an absurd premise to a logical conclusion. They are clearly linked to the real world.)
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