With Ken Hill’s version of H G Wells' story we return to the days of popular theatre, very much in the manner laid down by Joan Littlewood at Stratford East over 30 years ago. For modern audiences, it has to be distanced, of course, placed in the context of an Edwardian music-hall bill, presided over by Brian Murphy as the comedian Thomas Marvel, who also inserts himself into Wells’ tale as a tramp who wanders into the village of Iping where the action takes place, and finds himself embroiled in the goings-on and is even ear-marked as the first disciple in the Invisible Man's plan for world domination. But the original story stands up quite well as a semi-horror narrative in its own right, with the heavily-bandaged mystery man, Griffin, arriving at the village inn to carry on his experiments undisturbed, but nevertheless finding himself the object of curiosity and fear which he is compelled to do his best to satisfy. Not surprisingly, there is very little depth in Ken Hill's interpretation of the story, no feeling that the Invisible Man is either a tragic victim of science or a menace to the safety of me world. Instead we get rather a lot of pretty coarse acting and fairly awful jokes, with every character an unashamed stereotype, from ill-tempered Landlady to stupid policeman, from silly-ass squire to comic vicar.

One of the show's strong points are the magic effects created by Paul Kieve, not particularly startling in themselves, for I would guess most magicians and many a practised watcher of live magic would have an inkling of how they are done, but nicely integrated into the script so that we wait expectantly for them to happen, and are not disappointed when they do. In the company are several stalwarts of the Stratford East academy, including the matchless Tom Palmer, whose expression when her prodigious bosom is interfered with is a joy to behold, and Larry Dann as both the treacherous Dr Kemp and the dim-witted bobby. A couple of music-hall-type numbers open and close the show, but for the most part Brendan Healy's music is truly incidental in the traditional sense of the word, and Hayden Griffin has devised settings which would not be out of place in the theatre of the beginning of this century.