Like a lecherous windmill

By Isabel Lloyd

With Stephen Mangan in the lead, it’s a fair bet that “Birthday”, a new play from Joe Penhall, won’t be a tragedy. Mangan left RADA in the mid-1990s, and has done little but comedy, or comedy-drama, since. Highlights have included the motor-mouthed, sexually inappropriate anaesthetist in Channel 4’s “Green Wing”; the beardy, shambling lead—a “gigolo in a haystack”—in the revived “Norman Conquests”; and a cussing, shagging, strangely endearing divorcé in Channel 4’s “Free Agents”. All three played to his strengths: lechery, which sits comically on his lugubrious, Deputy Dawg features; and windmilling, sharply co-ordinated displays of lack of co-ordination.

But he needs to play big. In the fatally underwritten BBC4 adaptation of Douglas Adams’s “Dirk Gently”, Mangan struggled to find a way into the lead, while his co-star Darren Boyd used his migrant intonations—an actor’s philosopher’s stone—to turn the drossest line into gold.