THANKS to his recent prolific output, the current trademark of director Ian Brown is beginning to emerge - sharp post-modernism with a touch of flash. Robin Don is the designer here supplying a series of cool, clever, revolving backdrops - smart legal chambers, aga-dominated rural bliss - in Peter Moffatt's subtly anti-laddish tale of boys being boys. But has Brown gone too far this time? Is there less than actually meets the eye?
Moffatt won the Pearson TV new writers award with Nabokov's Gloves. A strange, off-the-wall excursion into the spikey, uneasy battle of the sexes of thirtysomething professionals, Moffatt's style is cryptic to downright oblique.
The gloves of the title, for example, refer to a flight of fancy run-in between roving husband Nick, (and Emma Thompson beau) Greg Wise, and Niamh Cusack's suspicious wife. Nick's assertion that Nabokov may have played goal-keeper is counteracted by Cusack's Fran insisting rather that he may have been a white-gloved lepidopterist, and is supposed to tell us something significant about their relationship.
'Fraid it was lost on me. All the same, Moffatt does catch a modish kind of moral coarseness - legal men behaving badly (Nick consorts and consummates with one of his clients, Ruth Gemmell's fey Scottish runaway) but caught like butterflies on the end of waspish female intuition.
A game of consequence and inconsequential badinage - Nick and his best pal, Joe (Dominic Mafham) get off in a big way on pop-song quizzing - it's hard ultimately to say what it's really about. Fun though.
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