No Wise Men – review

In front of a battered brick wall covered with remnants of things that once were – doors, windows, peeling remnants of adverts for safety matches – floats, or seems to float, a man holding a flickering flame (the brilliant Javier Marzan), who introduces a winter's tale of "strange things" and its "hero", Jack. What follows is an incredibly long set-up for what develops, shortly before the interval, into a rather jolly story. In a series of over-written scenes that explain much and dramatise little, it is hammered home to the audience that Jack is a monumentally self-centred liar, cheat and thief. He is also, as played by John Nicholson, at such a constant pitch of frenzied nastiness that his pregnant wife and her family seem two-dimensionally nice-but-dim for enduring him. It isn't until Jack's reality unexpectedly segues into a chorus of Dickens characters – Bill Sykes, Nancy and, later, the Little Match Girl – that the opening's spark of promise finally flares.