Everything about Nigel Planer’s latest play is promising and interesting, and yet it stubbornly refuses to fly. The setting is exotic – the South Pacific islands in the late 19th century. The characters are attractive – Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. The subject is profound – the way we approach death. But in spite of this enticing material, the play frequently stalls and it is hard to get a handle on what it is driving at. Planer’s wit, research and interest in Polynesian culture are evident, but he does not convert them into satisfying drama.

It opens well. We are faced with what appears to be the body of Stevenson, prone on the floor and covered with flowers. His servants attend him; his groundsman is intoning his funeral oration. Has he passed on already? But no, as the groundsman falters in his speech, Stevenson suddenly pipes up to correct him – Sean Murray rising to the challenge of delivering his opening line flat on his back.

This, it transpires, is a rehearsal, part of Stevenson’s elaborate preparation for death. But as the play weaves its way to his actual demise, which is messy and panicked, the unfinished business in his life presses on to the stage. He bickers with his wife, flirts with the maid, evades the question of money and work, and builds castles in his banana pudding.

For the second act we are with Gauguin, who died on a South Pacific island three years after Stevenson. His relationship with both death and the locals is more informal yet even more agitated. Having been shopping for arsenic, absinthe and morphine, he is set on suicide but is going about it in an unfocused way. He blunders about the stage, bullying his common-law Tahitian wife and sounding off about society and the church.

Between them the two halves of the play examine cultural and personal attitudes to death, the contrast between Europe and the Pacific islands, and the artists’ differing conduct. But the piece proves surprisingly stodgy and many of the characters have little depth or impact. The cast, in Alexander Summers’s production, is strong, with Murray leading the way as a mercurial Stevenson and a maverick Gauguin, but even his considerable energy is not enough to invigorate the material. ★★☆☆☆

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