The Common Pursuit (Menier Chocolate Factory)

Simon Gray's play starts back in Cambridge University in 1968 and follows a bunch of promising students as they weather life over the next 18 years.

For its plot, Gray  -  at best a fabulously grumpy writer  -  owes a large bunch of flowers to Frederic Raphael for nicking his Glittering Prizes format.

This is a nostalgic wander down memory lane to a time when undergraduates set up purist literary magazines with arcane titles and chaps had girlfriends with nice names like Marigold.

Arrogant: Reece Shearsmith in The Common Pursuit at the Menier Chocolate Factory

We meet Stuart (Robert Portal) who starts a highbrow mag from his Cambridge rooms. When he and his various mates resurface in Eighties London, things have changed. The flared trousers have come and gone and the world has grown colder and crueller. The publishing venture has become coffee table tripe.

Better, perhaps, that they had never left the happy fens of academe. The cocky Nick (Reece Shearsmith) is now a media type with a smoker's cough in a shabby TV show.

A promising academic (Nigel Harman) is a polished publisher and adulterer.

The big revelation is that saintly Stuart's wife (a badly underwritten part in which Mary Stockley plays the only girl on stage) has had an economymotivated abortion just as her hubbie's magazine's Arts Council grant comes through.

The trump card in all this is the prickly commentator Humphry, Cambridge's most promising moral scientist (whatever that is), who as a don comes to a sad and sticky end as you sort of knew he would.

James Dreyfus plays him superbly while simultaneously managing to suggest he'd rather not be in the show at all.

Though well directed by Fiona Laird, I am not sure just how well this tale of tarnished promise and bruised ideals buffs up. I grew impatient with its clever clogs Oxbridge self-regard.

Even though the play ends in 1986, the thing is hard-wired with a disapproval of the present  -  a lazy sort of appeal.

Verdict: Things change. Get over it.

**