Fading telly personality, Fay, best remembered for a great consumer programme, is now fronting a down-market daytime show, but both career and looks are in freefall. When the play opens she's just featured in an un- flattering This is Your Life

It's at this point that old school chum, Bollards, a life-long failure and professional victim, turns up with her grown-up son.

Lesley Bruce's contemporary comedy doesn't just remind us of the odd real-life personality: it examines the cult of celebrity and the ephemeral nature of fame. Without exaggerating real life one iota it shows someone becoming famous simply for being a nobody.

And with its sinister and disturbing undertones, there's more than a touch of the Ayckbourns about it. Each character is probing everyone else, looking for as many Achilles Heels as possible.

Ali Murray and Michelene Harris, as Fay and Bollards respectively, are outstanding.

Murray's performance is particularly telling when Fay's in front of the camera and we're the studio audience. She captures that obligatory concerned look and the hand movements perfectly.

Harris's Bollards is deadly and terrifying. Speaking with a simpering voice and wearing big glasses, she invades physical space and displaces at will without anyone having the wherewithal to block her. Yet at the same time she's tragic and pathetic.

A somewhat flattish end means that, in its own terms, the play itself just fails to deliver. But this particular production, directed by Beryl Hoyle, does not: it's another success from the West Bridgford Dramatic Society.

Alan Geary