The Whisky Taster

James Graham has previously written excellent political plays on the Suez crisis and Lady Thatcher's origins. Now he turns his attention to the modern metropolis with a play that is part advertising ­industry satire, part thwarted romantic comedy, and part celebration of Scotch. But while it is breezily entertaining, it never achieves the perfect blend. Graham's focus is on a young ad agency dream team devising a campaign for a new vodka. Nicola, who hails from Croydon, relies on gift of the gab; the introspective Barney depends on a mysterious gift for translating sensations into colours. Rather bizarrely, the two of them hire the eponymous kilted Scot to apply his wisdom about whisky to their new vodka brand; and what they get from his gnomic utterances is a lesson about life. The implication is that both people and whisky mature slowly, and that their flavour is inseparable from their flaws. Graham also cunningly suggests there is a natural bond between Barney and the Scottish booze-taster: both possess an authenticity denied to their more shallow colleagues. But this is the play's problem. It takes it as a given that anyone involved in marketing is meretricious. And if Barney's synaesthesia makes him so special, it becomes hard to care whether he will ever get together with the more conformist Nicola. Satire and romance make strange ­bedfellows, but James Grieve's lively production is cast up to the hilt. Samuel Barnett, late of The History Boys, captures Barney's sexual shyness and fear of his neurological condition. Kate O'Flynn as Nicola also exudes a wonderful nervy vivacity, and John Stahl as the whisky-taster possesses the grizzled gravitas of the late Finlay Currie who adorned postwar movies. It may not be a perfect play, but so persuasive was Stahl's presence that I rushed home to enjoy what Pinter once called "the great malt that wounds".