There are the bones of a great production here, but it feels like a thought that hasn’t quite been finished, and I found that quite irksome indeed.

With the exception of Michael Maloney’s Ernest Eccles, the performances feel quite juvenile. There’s a youthfulness and naivety to them, but not in a way that feels inherent to the characters themselves. There’s little connection between the lives these people are supposed to have experienced and the words coming out of their mouths.

The characters feel like representations of people from a time gone by rather than people actually inhabiting it, as though at any given moment we might be ushered into another room at The London Dungeon. They come across as flat, and towards the end of Act 1, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a reason to come back for the rest of the play.

I do like the way Act 1 ended, however, and it promises something quite different from the hour that preceded it. There should be tension, grit, sustained suspense and a sense of terror as we experience the treatment of Jenny Maple, a working woman caught between love, money and men who are all too willing to exploit her pursuit of both. The play has every opportunity to create something genuinely discomforting, but it all feels quite pretty and stale. Any signs of something more dissipate within moments of arriving.

Alongside this, we see Ella Dawson and Ernest Eccles navigating a potential relationship, providing what should be effective awkwardness and humour. But again, we never quite get there. There are moments when Rosalind Lailey and Michael Maloney are joyous to watch, yet their relationship feels almost incidental to the story unfolding around them. An inconvenient B-plot of sorts.

For a piece like this, you either lean into the minimalism and darkness of it all to keep the audience captivated, or you create something far more grounded and fully realised. The production attempts both but achieves neither, and whilst the two approaches could theoretically complement one another, there’s little here to suggest that this production could successfully pull off either, let alone both.

We end up with a fully realised bar and George Perry’s home, but every other location, of which there are quite a few, is left to suggestion. That isn’t necessarily a problem, but these spaces frequently become indistinguishable from one another. Where the opportunity arises to add context and depth to the characters, the staging fails to provide what the text seems to assume is already there.

We don’t need to physically be in those rooms, but for a piece dealing with working women and the ‘will they, won’t they’ of a landlady and her barman, we need clear and decisive shifts between locations. Better sound design could so easily remedy this. Distinct and coherent audible changes would establish where we are without distracting the audience or requiring the moment of thought that the current staging so often demands.

One thing I absolutely detested, yet completely understood, was the constant attempt to conjure a bustling London street using the entire cast. These sequences simply aren’t tight enough. The actors frequently appeared to get in one another’s way, particularly when moving set pieces, making the choreography feel more chaotic than purposeful.

Other reviewers have praised the seamless transitions and the masterful way the production drifts from sequence to sequence, so perhaps I caught it on an off night. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the experience I had. The transitions felt messy and quite amateurish.

Things do, ironically, improve when the play moves at its fastest. Relationships begin to disintegrate, and tensions between wants, needs and desires finally permeate what is otherwise a very bland play. Yet the movement remains too choreographed, too deliberate to feel natural. Character encounters should feel fleeting, particularly with such minimal staging, but instead the production seems determined to make every transition an event.

Instead, the play is invested in building a world that doesn’t exist.

I will say, I like the play. I like what it’s trying to do. But this production needs to decide what it wants to be and commit to it with absolute conviction.

The overarching premise of a writer scorned by personal rejection, whose perspective provides the conceit through which we experience the story, feels almost entirely lost. These moments need more time to breathe and settle. Let the atmosphere build and the story tell itself.

This is one of those rare occasions where a bit more smoke would make a great difference to the experience of watching. But again, what sort of London are we trying to inhabit? Dark, dank streets illuminated by lanterns, with something potentially sinister lurking in the shadows? Or a world of perceived decadence, dishonesty and deceit, lavish and fully embodied on the surface but rotten underneath?

Either is a legitimate choice, but it is a decision still waiting to be made.

Overall, I left frustrated. This did not feel like a finished production and should not be treated as such.

It needs to be tighter, potentially shorter, and make better use of tension and silence. Several lines could be cut entirely, particularly those that explicitly explain the thoughts and feelings of characters or brazenly tell the audience what’s happening instead of showing it. Which is entirely the point of theatre.

I would revisit the piece were it to undergo some major cosmetic work and a few characterisation workshops. Alex Bhat’s George Perry occasionally comes close to delivering something genuinely convincing, but even he gets lost as the production flails between world-building, suspense and shock. There’s a good play in the making here, and I genuinely hope it finds the confidence to become one.