When I went to the box office I could only say, ‘I’ve come to see the play tonight. I forget the title’. The Box Office Assistant couldn’t remember either, she had to look it up. Phew, at least it wasn’t sold out. I had come to see the work of David Leddy. I had heard of his capabilities from a guy in a pub who used to process their funding applications, and thought his work worth tracking down.

I’m glad I made the effort. If you are looking for how big a play you can make from two affable performers, Wendy Seager and Neill McCormack, and a bunch of 13A appliances, here is an extremely good example. The premise that the whole story was related verbatim to a drunk David Leddy in a pub by the similarly drunk protagonists is proposed from the outset. Postmodern mind games wittily pepper the show and whether this is true or merely an invented piece of hokum doesn’t matter. The resonances of globalised crime and the interconnection of all things, good or evil, ring true enough. 

The piece is something between a cautionary tale and a morality play; no mean feat nowadays. The scams which the couple engender attract the attention of bigger and bigger sharks, and while their ambitions are for profitable notoriety rather than actual robbery, revenge is taken by those who, while they could afford to lose their investment, cannot afford to lose face. The particular tool used for this revenge evokes a particular and horrific nausea which the women in the audience are, perhaps, ill-equipped to share.

What is finally invoked is a secret act of wholehearted goodness which you can plausibly imagine as the only way in which the vulnerable and exploited can be rescued in the light of institutions which either fail massively, are actively complicit or turn a blind eye.

Go watch this highly imaginative, entertaining and well-wrought production. Tonight’s performance at the Riverfront is the last on the Welsh leg of Fire Exit’s tour.