Clever meshing of fact and fantasy

How To Act Around Cops

Pleasance

Kenneth - What Is The Frequency?

Assembly Rooms

TWO young men are driving at night near Las Vegas when they are stopped by a police officer.

They panic, for they have much to hide. The cop is led to a rape scene where a black man holds a white woman hostage. Two random deaths occur. Or is this really what is happening?

The whole thing is played in Stygian gloom, adding to our sense of disorientation.

There is much to applaud in Logan Brown and Matthew Benjamin's study of authority and paranoia, acted with conviction by the cast of five, but more questions are raised than are answered.

Kenneth - What is the Frequency? is a rather clever meshing of fact and fantasy by American playwright Paul Allman.

American news anchor Dan Rather (Toby Wherry) was mugged on a Manhattan street in 1986: Allman interplays this actual event with a fantastical whodunnit, and chief suspect is writer Donald Barthelme (Larry Bull).

The two men never met, but the destructive hurricane that launched Rather's TV reporting career also ended Barthelme's as the country's youngest museum director, and this coincidence is the starting point for a rip-roaring story that weaves sex scandals and TV egos with meteorology and how to make the perfect squirrel stew.

As a member of the audience said on the way out: "I enjoyed it enormously, but I'm not sure I understood any of it."

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