Review - My Dad's Gap Year at Park Theatre

Comedian Jack Whitehall made a glorious documentary series with his agent dad Michael called Travels with My Father, which documented their travels together to South East Asia and Eastern Europe. It was both hilarious and moving, as it chronicled their very different approaches to life and travel, but also the affectionate and biological affinities that have bonded them.

I thought of this fondly as I watched My Dad's Gap Year, in which playwright Tom Wright also has a father and his son hit the road together for a spontaneous gap year trip that dad springs on his son for both of them to get laid and get high in Thailand.

But it's a very different, and sadly far more improbable, proposition. These start with the show's promotional poster, which features a buff lad in rainbow-coloured speedos, a sarong-wearing Thai woman, and a bare-buttocked bald older man standing on a beach at the edge of a clearly photo-shopped sea. Nothing resembles anything you'll actually see in the show.

But if you can hardly blame a show for not bringing a warm Thai ocean lapping at the shore into a tiny studio theatre on an early February night in Finsbury Park where snow flurries are making an appearance outside, you do at least crave believable characters and some dramatic rhythm.

The play, however, is a collection of comic cliches, even as it tries to be subversive: here it's the son who is behaving in a more grown-up way than his dad. And while dad - suffering from alcoholism and (it turns out) cancer as well - who has separated from his wife has his reasons for wanting to avoid reality, the son's encounter with it in the shapely form of a boyish young architect who doesn't believe in monogamy stretches credulity. Meanwhile, dad takes up with a hotel pool waitress, who turns out to be trans.

In the circumstances, the likeable cast of five work against the odds of both the writing and also Rikki Beadle-Blair's production (that maroons them in a pit around a perimeter walkway for no good reason) to make it feel as truthful as possible. It's a losing battle though.

My Dad's Gap Year is at the Park Theatre until 23rd February.