In Labour's last full year in government, they spent an astonishing £1.8 billion on consultants.
Playwright Neil Fleming found himself - rightly - exercised by this, yet sadly the dramatic end product isn't the scalpel-sharp satire on the no-ultimate-responsibility consultancy culture that Fleming and director Geoff Church obviously think it is.
Hugo Shackleton (James Wilby) is CEO of a medical imaging company struggling with competition from Korea. Lost for ideas to present at the forthcoming board meeting, he hires aggressive, wheelchair-bound James Ross (Pip Donaghy) and his attractive young colleague Nicola (Helen Millar), power-game-playing management consultants from hell, or perhaps The Adjustment Bureau. James and Nicola soon decide that Hugo, rather than an errant business model, is the real problem.
The dialogue is arch and the plotting improbable and we wait in vain for some proper back-story to flesh out James's unrelenting misanthropy.
Fleming seems to be saying - or at least seems to want to be saying - that bosses should cut the crap, make their own decisions and stick by them, but this is undercut by the fact that the consultants do spur dithering Hugo into some sort of action, even if unexpected. Wilby, doyen of Merchant Ivory films in their glory years, is seen depressingly infrequently on our stages but is much too fine an actor to be involved with this nonsense. Nonetheless, he makes nice work of Hugo's rumpled decency and the impressive Millar deals stoically with the repeated references to Nicola's ponderous hobby-cum-metaphor, ice climbing.
The Consultant
Theatre 503, The Latchmere Pub
Battersea Park Road, SW11 3BW
