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In The Good Life Penelope Keith played a suburban snob,  in To The Manor Born an aristocratic snob.  Now in a dazzling display of versatility, she plays a snob with a drink problem.The Dragon's Tail is the theatrical equivalent of toasted marshmallow.  On the outside it is crisp with laboriously flippant one liners but at the core it is gooey and sickly sweet.  It is, I suspect, exactly the kind of play John Osborne was rebelling against in the fifties and, emerging from this vacuous boulevard frippery, one does indeed look back on it  in anger.

The scene is North Wales where Miss Keith, a furniture maker who attempts to drown for frustrated maternal longings with prodigious quantities of alcohol, has come to get away from it all with her wimpish doctor boyfriend of 20 years' standing. Single-handedly pushing their broken-down van at night, Miss Keith runs over a tent.  Happily its owners are not inside it, but when they return—a  20 year old working class Mr. Fixit and his pugnacious 17 year-old sister—they are understandably miffed. This gives Miss Keith all the excuse she needs to launch into one of the towering tirades, complete with snooty cut glass vowels and haughty disdain, which have made her a star.  But Miss Keith also likes to demonstrate the suffering heart beneath the absurd exterior and within moments everyone is indulging in anguished heart-to-hearts—or at least attempting to.

The author, however, Douglas Watkinson, who has until now confined his energies to television, doesn't trust either his own talent or his audience sufficiently to create real characters or real emotion.  Like a tedious uncle at a family reunion, he peppers his script with a string of feeble jokes and verbal japes which rarely raises smile let alone a laugh. With mounting irritation one watches as the play lumbers towards its inevitable, and completely implausible, happy ending with the youngsters, who are of course orphans, deciding to throw in their lot with Miss Keith, providing her with the family she has always longed for.

The play is full of improbabilities. Who, but a television scriptwriter, could imagine the spunky and independent brother and sister moving in with the impossible Miss Keith?  Who but Miss Keith could play an alcoholic, who polishes off the best part of half a bottle of scotch before lunchtime, while looking and sounding like the wholesome leader of a Girl Guide camp?  But perhaps the biggest improbability of all is that the intelligent and talented Michael Rudman has consented to direct this rubbish.

Penelope Keith plays the dragon with the heart of gold with a noisy enthusiasm I wish I could share.  Mark Kingston and Robert Hines struggle manfully to breathe some semblance of life into the thinly written parts of the doctor and the brother. But the real acting honours belong to Amanda Root as the spiky but touchingly vulnerable sister. As soon as she announces that her name is Apricot one knows that Miss Keith is going to refer to her as every fruit in the orchard, but Root survives this indignity to give a performance of sincerity and surprising depth. Penelope Keith incidentally is a co-producer of this show.  She should be careful.  When toasting marshmallow you can get your fingers burnt.