Handful of women

At The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder I had to suspend my disbelief so hard that my brain chafed. Mr Pinder is an ordinary south London labourer who likes marrying, getting divorced and keeping the divorcees at home. Curtain up and he’s living with three former wives — and a new young filly has just cantered into the yard. The women rub along OK and accept that each gets just one night a week with the epic seducer. Only Mr Pinder isn’t epic, nor is he much of a seducer. He’s a sentimentalist who likes nattering and cuddling. Wife number one is a childless long-suffering depressive and it’s easy to see how the obsessive spouse-collector bagged her. But he has nothing to offer wife number two, a posh, sparky, hard-drinking sex-pot (memorably portrayed by Clare Holman) who’s up for fun and games. And never in his wildest dreams could he have landed wife three, a beautiful, strong-willed Caribbean spiritualist. I mean the guy’s a fat dreary slob aged somewhere between his free bus-pass and his free TV licence and the main feature of his ‘personality’, apart from lazy egoism, is his love of art. ‘It calms me down,’ he says. If he were any calmer he’d be a vegetable.

When the spiritualist quits the harem, Maurice replaces her with his ghastly secretary and the play promptly takes another leap into the codswallop canyon. There’s no way this bossy, small-minded typist, in a whistling nylon blouse, would have joined a lackadaisical swinger and his paddock of neurotic heifers. Apart from lacking credibility the play is textually weightless. It has nothing to say about the issues it raises and the issues it raises have nothing to say about us.

Its one attempt at philosophical rumination is Maurice’s tedious mantra that family is the most important thing in his life.