Treasure hunt

No idea why, but the hunt is on for lost 20th-century masterpieces. Michael Attenborough is searching for gold at the Almeida and Matthew Dunster has his pan in the stream at the Young Vic. Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding is an adaption of her 1946 bestselling novel. We’re in the Deep South where romantic tomboy Frankie (energetically played by Flora Spencer-Longhurst) wants to run away from home and begin a new life with her elder brother. Frankie’s character, depending on your point of view, is an adorable free spirit or an irksome little whinger who deserves to be clattered over the head with a horseshoe. The play’s structure is clumsy and indigestible and the sluggish plot strays up all kinds of unreasonable side alleys. It’s impossible to define exactly what makes a decent storyline but it’s very easy to tell when you’ve got a good ’un because the evening develops with unstable urgency, with desperate last-minute calculation, and you feel you’re watching a man rushing across thin ice, each bound carrying him almost to safety while the cracks beneath his feet blossom and spread. No such excitement here, just a washing line of speeches, songs, sentimentality and triple-thick melodrama. Like this. It’s the morning of 7 August 1945 and a character enters sporting an excitable attitude and a newspaper: ‘Says here we dropped a new kinda bomb called der a-tom bomb.’ Matthew Dunster’s handsome and finely acted production will, I expect, be blindly praised by reviewers because it has certain sacrosanct features (junior luvvies, themes of racism and child angst) which any decent critic will be reluctant to attack. But I’m no decent critic and I found this turgid bolus of emotional exhibitionism so majestically dull that I thought I was blending into my seat.