By Joy Watters, at the Byre Theatre

LOSING LOUIS by Simon Mendes da Costa comes to Scotland courtesy of Borderline, the Ayrshire touring company fighting a battle over losing its Arts Council grant.

Borderline prides itself on offering accessible theatre to as wide an audience as possible—and on the face of it, this black comedy may have seemed ideal.

Louis is the writer’s second play, selling out at Hampstead Theatre and moving to the west end. It is a tale of dirty deeds in a family over two generations, one bedding and a funeral, and the fall-out thereafter. It works on two time scales, the 1950s and the present—the action moves between the two, scene by scene.

It is quite a derivative work. Much is farce-like with the odd serious moment which seems to have come from another work.

It begins in the 50s when a lawyer is having an affair with his wife’s best friend, who lives with them and works in the same office. The lovers, Louis and Bella, do not know that Louis’ young son Tony is spying on them. The initial scenes of the pair in bed have a hesitancy about them which renders them simply embarrassing, setting the mood for the later stages.

This is the sort of piece that needs bigger performances if it is to really work, especially as it moves forwards half a century when the family are attending the funeral of Louis, the philanderer.

Tony is now in his fifties, married to a woman who wears the world’s shortest, tightest dress to the funeral. His brother Reggie and his snooty wife appear and it’s time for a few family secrets to be dug up now.

There are various west coast jokes and the writer has decided to make the family Jewish, apparently for the sake of the jokes, rather than for plot or characterisation.

Brian Pettifer’s production has a hesitancy about it which puts the piece in a theatrical no-man’s-land, at times it is oddly melodramatic then just turns into a joke-telling session and finally someone tries to make a point about families.

The overall effect is that various ingredients have been chosen to create the whole but unfortunately, they do not mix together and make it rise.

Losing Louis is at the Byre until Saturday and at the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline on September 30.