If someone had made slashing cuts on Toby Whithouse's laborious 90-minute satire on the exploitative vacuousness of today's television, perhaps a tolerable half-hour playlet might have emerged.
Blue Eyes and Heels is trapped in repetitive mockery and reminiscence syndrome, not to mention chronic verbosity, with Martin Freeman's odiously real TV producer, Duncan, making a sad and furious fool of Victor, John Stahl's relic of a wrestler.
Jonathan Fensom's boxing-ring stage design offers false hopes of conflict. The only dramatic incident, when Whithouse's inert prose stumbles into vivacious life, bursts out of the blue. For a few minutes the stage is dominated by verbal fisticuffs in Jonathan Lloyd's tame production.
Freeman's riveting Duncan, a cynical young hustler with a frozen heart and morals in tatters, argues populism is television's only gold-standard: you must dumb down to the lowerdepths and pander to a "stupid, frightening, violent public".
Serena Evans's Emma makes a far less trenchant and vaguer case for producer's "integrity" and "taste". The dispute is contained in the rickety framework of fifty-plus Victor's endless recollections of his wrestling heydays, which Whithouse retails in excessive, monologuing nostalgia.
In crudish satire, the author aims a few smacks at opportunist Duncan and the precariousness of the TV producer's life. Victor dressed to wrestle and kill as the masked Count of Monte Cristo is transformed into an Elephant Man Paedophile in a bid to make Wrestling freshly sensational TV.
When this wrestler becomes a casualty of double-dealing and accuses Duncan of giving him false hopes, the producer retorts with a suitably witty requiem for human decency and for a media that aims above the lowest common denominator: "If I've ever given hope it was entirely unintentional."
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Blue Eyes And Heels
