The Just Desserts season of eight short theatrical insights were just enough to entertain, but didn't really leave me waiting for more at the Rose and Crown theatre last week, writes Rachel Clifford.

Horla Theatre Company opened with The Dark, a psychotic and dramatic seduction, perfectly designed for the pub venue and setting the stage for an entourage of pathetic men, designed for sex, beer and sitting on the sofa.

Depicting the final stages of a flawed marriage, Janice Kennedy wrote in a perfect hanging for the adulterous husband whose marriage has already long gone.

Steve Morley's philosophical version of the Zoo was next to come, telling the story of an old maid and her useless newspaper collecting husband whose attempts at running a zoo reached a tragic end.

"My Wife" as Melody Kaye is known throughout the play is battling to run the place and probably on her own thanks to the unhelpful "My Husband".

Doomed

It all turns sour when she sets the animals free and is killed by a tiger after the doomed couple realise they can't afford to keep them.

The political analogy finished when her aloof husband shoots the bear and a confused audience is left wondering why, as I suspect Morley intended.

But off-stage sounds of birds and bears did little to capture a vision of tormented or forgotten animals.

An unravelled and deeply confusing philosophical debate about "it", whatever "it" is, came next in GODOT Arrives. And despite a Kant-cum-Marx style crossword puzzle, we still don't know what "it" is.

The star of the show for me came in The Last Word finale, with a top class performance from Fiona Aldridge, who gets more than she bargained for when she decides to go home alone.

Having shunned companionship from both her mother and rejected boyfriend, she meets her darkest hour in a wood with a rapist-not much of a just desserts there.

November 12, 2001 12:32