Tales From The Settee - The Settee Council at The Unity Theatre.

Point of view one:
Your cat is wearing underpants, there's pizza on the ceiling and an old man asleep in the bath.
Bewildered and bruised, you survey the post-party carnage. Fighting back tears, you try to figure out how "a few cans and a smoke" could possibly be mistaken for "my flat is your flat and my carpet your ashtray. Come to think of it, why not move in?"

Point of view two:
You awake up in a pool of slobber on a strange kitchen floor. You're money and ciggies have vanished but the bloke by the bins has got ten Marlboro's in his mitt. You blag a fag and end up sitting in the same spot talking serious shit for six hours 'cause you've lost your cash card and your legs have gone dead.

Point of view three:
The Unity audience is listening-in to strange 'Tales From The Settee'. Like the sober guest at a bacchanalian bash, we stare at those floating in hang-over limbo, the dazed revellers dispelling tin-pot philosophies, pretentious pap and farcical falsehoods into the morning-after air.

A girl enters the room and tries to watch TV, remaining silent throughout, as the stream of the weird and wonderful beings surface in the make-shift temple of Bacardi Breezer.

There's Lefty, the scouse Citizen Smith who once shared a bevvie with Che Guevara and discovered that the revolutionary was only ever fighting for the right to have "a beer and a laugh"

The uber-scally Tommo with a Phd in art theory, and Mags the anti-everything girl who dismisses swans as wildlife's white supremacists.

Enter Clara the half-baked hippie-chick who doesn't know her arse from her aura and a small-time dope dealer Jargo with the whacked-out mentality of a five year old, flogging gear one minute, talking to teddy bears the next.

Then there's Jill and Nobby, the obligatory 'couple who shagged': sporting a head like a back-combed mohair jumper, the girl slowly drowns in remorse whilst the posh bloke in stripey boxers brags about his bedroom conquest.

Perhaps the most frightening of all are Twinkle and Spanky, the wannabee E queens who'd dance to the buzz of an alarm clock if told it was cool.

The cartoonish characters are ALL extremely amusing. At the close of the show, the 'girl' tells them all to piss off and us too but apart from that 'Tales From The Settee' has no plot to speak of: "The story is in many ways an excuse for the cast to get up and do whatever they feel like" says the piss-taking programme. Okay, every so often a niggling doubt crawled into my mind: is this simply an elaborate exercise in 'in-crowd' self-indulgence? But each time such evil thoughts raised their ugly head, another classic one-liner pulled me back in or a new character hijacked my senses. I'm loathed to try and drag any intellectual meaning from a piece that took pleasure in laughing at itself. No doubt the creative team - headed by Paul Tarpey - would be disappointed if I did. Beneath the obviously under-rehearsed framework (though the greatly entertained auditorium didn't seem to mind),there's an extremely clever script waiting to be honed to perfection.
If I must pick through the crazy debris for a message, it's that, yes, most of the world is completely off its head and, remember to always leave a party before dawn.

- Marnie

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