This vacuous comedy thriller by Robert Massey involves a young taxi-driver and his taxi-mates who get mixed up in a ridiculous plot. Addiction to gambling, armed robbery and a violent casino owner loom large.

The play occupies a thrill- and- wit‑free zone from which there is no escaping. It offers new ammunition for my belief that too many plays about Ireland by Irish writers are presented in London, especially at this address. Barack Obama, in his inspirational victory speech, affirmed his belief in the diversity of an America that made the country exciting. If only the Tricycle offered a more diverse range.

It claims to present a multi-cultural programme which “attracts and reflects London’s diverse community”. If that assertion were accurate, we would regularly see new plays at the Tricycle and equivalent, subsidised theatres, by and about South Americans, Scandinavians, Italians, Australians, the Welsh and Scottish, the gay and the straight.

A sort of plot laboriously unfolds.Carl, Alan King’s bland, thirtyish, fattish taxi driver, with hardly a penny to his name, owes several thousand in gambling debts to Bryan Murray’s violent, casino-owning criminal, Jack and his retrosexual, muscle-obsessed son, Freddy. Massey tries to crank his thriller into dramatic life by making it almost a matter of life and death that the taxi-driver pay his debts before night falls. Carl’s father-in-law, Eamonn Hunt’s inscrutable George, who, it transpires for no significant reason, was long ago Jack’s best friend, duly agrees to be caught up in criminality to save Carl’ s skin.

The men’s collection of a money-filled bag from a field (which designer Blaithin Sheerin ineptly evokes with green and purple sheeting) leaves us none the wiser as to the men’s intentions. None of the pressing issues are resolved in a production by Jim Culleton, whose momentum is stalled by contrived, not very funny disgressions on sex-telephone lines, adulterous coupling in cars and mass-buying of loo-rolls. Weird.
Until 29 November (020 7328 1000).