Theatre review: Drinking and Unemployment: A New Play About Work, Just The Tonic @ The Grass Market Centre, Edinburgh

Drinking and Unemployment: A New Play About Work, Just The Tonic at the Grass market Centre (Venue 27)

This interminable one-man play from Chicago is performed with such supreme self-confidence by its author, Kevin Christopher Fox, that it’s quite harrowingly boring.

Drinking and Unemployment: A New Play About Work, Just The Tonic @ The Grass Market Centre, Edinburgh *

A self-conscious showcase for Fox’s versatility, it essays a focus group conducted by a sociologist studying professional deformation – how our jobs affect our behaviour.

Of course, one of the study group is an actor (of course!) with predictably insufferable self-referential results. It’s psychologically flatulent, pathologically pleased with itself and performed with a tooth-aching facile sincerity that suggests an alarming lack of self-awareness. So, yeah, not great.

Until 25 August.

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