'The Gift' review — this hilariously zany poo-dunnit uses the hunt for a harasser to spark an existential crisis

Read our review of Dave Florez's comic play The Gift, now in performances at the Park Theatre to 1 March.

With friends like this, who needs enemies? That’s a polite way of describing the situation that afflicts the hapless Colin (Nicholas Burns), who isn’t best pleased to discover that a gift box from an upscale patisserie doesn’t contain the hoped-for chocolate éclair.

Far from it: unbidden – and arriving from an unknown source – within the elegant packaging is a lump of excrement that may or may not smell (its scent seems not to be an issue) but does reduce Colin to a sniffer dog, keen to ferret out the perpetrator. Sorry, make that poopetrator, to co-opt the language of the play.

And so begins Dave Florez’s sparky if untidy three-hander The Gift, which folds the expected scatological jokes into a gathering enquiry into existential self-doubt. Jokes about “getting to the bottom” of so mysterious a gift morph across four acts (one interval) into an enquiry into “the godforsaken nothing-ness of it all”: Samuel Beckett, watch out!

The much-debated excretion turns out to be a catalyst for Colin’s reset – an opportunity for him to tackle head on the (you’ll excuse the word, much-quoted in the play) shit that is crowding out his life.

Florez’s ambitions are laudable. Not many people would transmute the raw material for a gross-out comedy into a study in aberrant psychic behaviour that tilts the play towards the realm of Art and God of Carnage: dual studies by Yasmina Reza of civility under stress.

And you certainly feel the unshaven Colin approaching some sort of personal abyss, Burns flailing about Sara Perks’s notably antiseptic set in a dressing gown and pyjamas as if to get dressed for the day would be a societal concession too far. The actor adroitly registers both the elemental pain of the character, and his robust physicality.

Florez has great fun with the possible deliverers of such dung, as Colin thinks back on everyone he’s ever wronged or who might still be holding a grudge. (Ring any bells with contemporary politics?) Could onetime university chum Martin O’Connell be the person responsible, or Rupert from communications? (At one point, there are 49 candidates for the misdeed.)

The first half comes to a gasp-inducing climax that tells far from the whole story, as the narrative snakes its way towards further surprises, stretching credibility and raising the tone to fever pitch and beyond.

There’s certainly nothing sedate about the staging from Adam Meggido, who has directed several plays in the popular …Goes Wrong franchise. The physical confrontations between Colin and brother-in-law Brian (Alex Price) prompt audible gasps, leaving Laura Haddock’s career woman, Lisa, to try and maintain order. Verbal volleys escalate fast (there’s a hilarious one involving Facebook), whilst comedy extends to such divergent realms as Rich Tea biscuits and Zsa Zsa Gabor’s email habits.

As someone who vividly remembers the actual person, I was amused to find that the onetime Tory politician (and critic!) David Mellor nowadays needs specific identification, and you don’t expect Bach and Nietzsche to share a stage with a wisecrack at the expense of The Wire.

And just when you start to recoil from the sweary environs (the C-word gets a workout), the characters engage in a salutary group hug, as if to remind themselves, and us, that faeces can, indeed, be an agent of cleansing.

The Gift is at the Park Theatre to 1 March. Book The Gift tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Gift (Photos by Rich Southgate)