Picture the scene: an early cast meeting, director pacing the floor. “Howdy guys”, she says, with boundless enthusiasm. “Come down to the front y’all, and show me your best American accents!” If scores of British actors have fallen at the Yankee hurdle, what’s to stop the cast of Marvin’s Room – an early nineties American classic by Scott McPherson – sounding like a stroke-affected Dick Van Dyke, or worse, Gwyneth Paltrow?

The answer, predictably, is a bit of a mixed bag. Bessie and Hank, played by Kiran Milwood-Hargrave and Luka Krsljanin respectively, pull off a very convincing, but unplaceable drawl; others are less successful, veering from Kansas to Dublin via South Kensington at dizzying speed. Perhaps this is a clever reading of the characters, who all appear to be borderline bipolar, but I doubt it.

A quick summary then: Bessie has leukaemia, and needs a transplant from a relative. Cue the arrival of neurotic sister Lee (Katy Alcock), her Ohio beefcake first-born Hank (straight from the mental institution), and his younger brother Charlie, played with refreshing lightness by James Barwise. Marvin, on the other hand, chills in his room off stage, one-eyed and diabetic. He’s been dying for 20 years.

All in all, a bit of a sorry tale. McPherson was moved to write after the death of a lover from AIDS. He met the same fate at just 33 years old. Bessie may be on the brink, but it is the uncertainty surrounding the guy in the back that really brings out the characters’ true feelings. “Don’t you ever wish he would just die?” says Hank to Bessie in the Florida moonlight, close enough to the sea to taste it. Talking about how the intimacy of the Corpus Playroom lends itself perfectly to some productions, is more of a Varsity cliché than “This Smoker was a bit hit and miss”. Then again, it ain’t a cliché for nothing, and perfectly applicable here.

So what happened to the rest of those coveted stars? The main problem was that the promise of a ‘darkly comic’ production failed to materialise. Mark Wainwright’s Dr Wally, though blessed with the odd gem (on taking a bone-marrow sample: “It’ll make a slight crunching noise”) at times felt like a directorial reaction to the sincerity of the other characters. I love dark – I’m thinking of redecorating my room in burgundy. Those with different tastes in interior design, however, should readjust their palettes for what is still a very watchable, if not ‘darkly comic’ play.