In Edinburgh last year I saw a play that clarified a few things for me about playwriting. It was called To Have and To Hold, and it was written by Joey Batey, the writer of this week’s ADC lateshow, winner of the Footlights Harry Porter Prize Odds and Ends. What it clarified is that you can’t make a comedy out of funny one-liners. A self-consciously “funny” play, if it has no decent structure, characters or dialogue that sounds anything close to what actual humans might exchange, is the equivalent of a friend going WHHHAAAY very loudly immediately after they tell a joke. A good rule of thumb both for acting and writing is that if the sole aim is make the audience laugh at the cost of everything else, you might succeed in your main aim for a while, but at the cost of leaving the audience feeling like they’ve eating a rather cut-rate air-pie.

So has Batey improved on his last outing? I had high hopes at the beginning. Peter Skidmore’s bombastic reporter gave an amusing Day Today- style unhelpful summation of the non-specific WAR taking place, while the three characters facing their deaths in a prison camp in said WAR gave great promise. But it quickly became clear that Batey had no real idea of what he wanted to do with them. They were the standard comic trio from Blackadder goes Forth: The realist normal one (Charlie Merriman), the bright, optimistic but stupid one (Alex Gomar) and the slow and stupid one (Rupert Mercer). Facing the dawn firing squad for Blackadder’s characters allowed wonderful black humour, here the characters just exchange pop-culture absurdities. Yes, they get laughs for incongruousness, and some of them are very funny (I liked the sudden introduction of Mel Gibson to the escape plan), but they are mainly there to fill time in rubbish-male mode. I’m sure in that situation you would just want to fill time, but the characters are too goofy to find any pathos in them, and most of the dialogue is simply set ups for the next gag.

I hear Batey is a good stand-up, and this piece has all the hallmarks of a stand-up trying to work his material into a setting. Like To Have and To Hold before it, it doesn’t work dramatically, and frankly just comes off ill-considered and tasteless given the subject matter. There is simply no excuse for the delivery of bad puns followed by mugging to the audience in an attempt at a comic play about death, nor is there much room for jibes at the Tab reviewers, nor bizarre, clanging attempts at ethnic humour.

The performances are played far too much for laughs, even though the performers are talented – Gomar especially could have delivered something so much better had he really committed to the earnestness of his character rather than eyeing the audience for more laugh-extraction. Jennie King turns up doing a similar comic performance to those we’ve seen before from her, but it’s just too broad alongside everyone else to really add much to proceedings.

All of which said, the phrase “necrophiliac bears” is very funny, and along with other choice nuggets, will make you laugh a fair bit. Not enough to hang a play on, but it shows Batey can do comedy in the short-term. If he really wants to live up to his prestigious prize, he must learn to write plays first and then add the comedy in. Random things happening on stage cannot make a good play, certainly not one that lasts more than an hour and has a somewhat questionable attitude to British servicemen in a week when yet more have lost their lives. I don’t think this play should face the firing squad – maybe just an honourable discharge would do.