Early in this play, one of the cast described how a friend once stamped on a fish, only for its ruptured eyeballs to dribble all over his shoes. Even at that point, I envied the shoes. After two hours I envied the fish. The most diverting features of the production were the grubby Page 3 cut-outs stuck to the set’s bathroom wall, and I write that as an homosexual.

William Fergus Stuart presumes to explore the mind of a pyschotic, but succeeds only in inducing the mental derangement it tries to simulate. I have seen audiences get restless in theatres before, even begin to mutter faintly, but never eat their hair, bury their faces in an empty seat next to them or start to emit shrieks of manic laughter quite unrelated to anything happening on stage. Had there been more than three of us there may have been riots, or even mass sectionings.

For WFS does not merely bore one, it bores into one, becoming in its latter stages an exercise in theatrical sadism. Where sensitive and compelling depictions of madness might evoke the otherworldly, perhaps even through language that is witty or adventurous, everything here is banal, a surrealism of tangled lamp chords and papier-maché Valentines hearts.

Creaking silences apart, the dominant mode is not dialogue, nor even disconnected ranting (though there’s plenty of that), but rather the robotic intonation of pop lyrics, accompanied by the song itself played out of time and at a more or less excruciating volume. The effect recalls one of the music rounds from I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, except much less funny and many, many times longer. Towards the end the characters actually start to sing, a mixed blessing when the female lead sounds like a castrato C3PO.

The fragments of the first half, at least, bear some remote resemblance to each other. We start with a Prologue, in which William’s friend Leo more or less breakdances around his coffin, alternating in what is meant to be a poignant way between spasms of grief and William’s vital statistics. The domestic scene that follows starts with a joke about constipation and becomes fixated on it: to make this a metaphor for the play’s failures of expression would be too obvious. After meeting a woman learned in soil magic (half Rubens nymph, half Blanche duBois post-lobotomy) William becomes, at least in his head, a soldier in Afghanistan and consequently a paraplegic. This is not sombre but rather emotional blackmail, using the medical notes of a wounded soldier as a palimpsest, much as the play as a whole uses Stuart’s own records.

What we have, then, is what Max Bialystock’s ‘Springtime for Hitler’ would have been like had everything gone as planned. This is a late show that follows a Beckett: if this is your genre, just see the damned Beckett. The one sweet consolation of a wasted evening is that you don’t need the advice – reviewers apart, there was no-one there. Some revival.