By Robert Bain

Meeting people on the internet is supposed to be the great 21st-century social phenomenon, but it strikes me as a contradiction in terms. Meeting people, surely, is something you do when you turn off the computer and go outside the house. It’s a view borne out in David Hauptschein’s The Playactor.

It all begins with the attractive and well-adjusted Margo arriving nervously in Philadelphia, from the other side of the United States, to meet her internet lover Charlie. It’s immediately crystal clear that she’s made a mistake. Charlie lives in a squalid apartment with his dozy, untrustworthy “friend” Judy, and his completely mad sister.

Instead of the whirlwind romance that she’s built herself up for, Margo is met with an awkward and impenetrable man who proceeds to confuse and frighten her, before promptly disappearing with his sister, leaving Margo alone.

The play starts promisingly. An attention to detail imbues everything from the beautifully crafted set to the actors’ nervous ticks. The characters are carefully drawn and well cast. It’s a shame, then, that the story seems to run out of places to go very quickly.

The warning signs don’t appear gradually – they are staring Margo in the face from the very start. And the web of lies and secrets doesn’t get a chance to untangle, because it was never really very tangled in the first place.

Margo spends most of the first act picking up her bag and preparing to leave in exasperation, but never does. It’s effective for a while, but there are only so many times the audience can ask themselves “Why doesn’t she just go?” before the bubble bursts and they don’t care any more.

Margo is, of course, the classic deluded character, trailing behind the audience in seeing things as they are. But in this instance it’s overplayed and implausible. She’s so oblivious to the situation, which becomes so dodgy so soon, that the audience’s sympathy and belief in her character quickly dry up. If it were really this easy for smelly weirdos to get nice girls to travel across a continent and fawn over them, I might change my mind about “meeting people on the internet”.

The relationships are engaging at first, but with an hour and a half to go, they’ve gone stale. From this point on the play is at its best in the brief scenes where we see characters alone, especially Charlie, and his crazy, unhinged monologues as he poses in front of his mirror.

It’s around the mysterious Charlie, played by Josh Cole, that the play succeeds in holding some interest – with the audience kept guessing as to which bits of his erratic behaviour show the “real” him, and which bits are just compulsive playacting to avoid facing up to life’s daunting realities.

There’s an attempt to take things up a notch in the final scenes, as Charlie gazes out of the window and despairs about the brutality and desperation of the world. The speech is clearly supposed to be some sort of climax, but it’s so unsubtle that it’s one of the least interesting parts of the play. By the time The Playactor eventually wraps itself up, it has run out of steam, and it’s hard to be too bothered how it turns out.

The production continues until March 3 at the Old Red Lion. Tickets: £12/10. Tuesday – Saturday 7.30pm, Sunday 6pm