How do you write a play? Here’s one theory. Put a guy up a tree, throw rocks at him, get him down again. It’s a good working template. Nick Payne’s latest script, Incognito, uses a different scheme. You put 21 guys up a tree, set them jabbering for 90 minutes and then go home. This cumbersome structure is greatly damaged by the decision to hire just four actors to play all 21 characters. And the locations, covering six decades, leap so often between Britain and America as to induce dizziness and possibly vomiting. There are no changes of costume, or set, to indicate where you are. You just have to guess.
One storyline involves a camp young Brit with chronic amnesia. Another traces a Scottish physicist who is turning, rather grandly, into a lesbian. Elsewhere, a rogue pathologist nicks Einstein’s brain in the hope of discovering the source of his genius.
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