Something less than the truth THEATRE

One Fine Day Albery Theatre, London

In One Fine Day, you accompany Eddie, a Liverpudlian metal worker, through the nightmare of being suspected of child abuse, of going into voluntary exile from his family, and of embarking on a hair-brained scheme to kidnap his children and take them out for a day's trip to the seaside. It's laughs all the way, though, in Dennis Lumborge's one-hander, which can claim the dubious distinction of being a feel-good play about this terrible predicament.

The problems partly stem from a mismatch between form and content. As writers from Browning to Alan Bennett have shown, the dramatic monologue is a genre supremely well adapted to presenting people who are unreliable witnesses to their own experience, who see themselves in an incorrigibly skewed way and so misreport the tone in which things have been said to them. It's what they consciously or unconsciously suppress between the lines that makes the most revealing impact.

As a result, it seems a perverse format for depicting a man who, though he likes kidding, is not kidding himself about his innocence. One Fine Day is so loaded in the protagonist's favour that it allows you to entertain only the most fleeting doubts on this score.You see Joe McGann's jaunty, likeable scouser, Eddie, through Eddie's eyes, not through those of his accusers, so the piece does not really bring home to you, as it is well placed to do, how fatally easy it is to misjudge men in this situation (and by presuming them innocent as well as guilty).

As it moves from kitchen to bedsit to police cell and back to the marital home, the play and Bob Tomson's production do give you some valuable insights into how it feels to be wrongly accused. It's the understandable flicker of uncertainty in his wife's eyes that makes Eddie abandon home. Pulling up outside the school on the day of the kidnap, he's annoyed to see his wife and children looking so happy, quite as though he'd never existed, and he briefly indulges in a fantasy of running them down. The way that the climate of suspicion can blight a man's natural desire for physical intimacy with his children comes across affectingly.

But the play suffers from wanting to have it both ways - to stick up for men's rights (there is some backlash stuff here about men not having the support groups women have, about penis envy and about fertility methods that dispense with fathers) while also making the PC gesture of turning Eddie into a house-husband at the end. In a skilful, winning performance, McGann establishes a tremendous rapport with the audience; you imagine wistfully how much better he'd be in a play that permitted a genuinely ambivalent response to this kind of hero. It's a tribute to McGann that the relentless chirpiness of the role (even in the stark police cell, Eddie is seen joking about how on earth they suppose you might commit suicide with the elastic from your jogging suit trousers) manages for the most part, to ingratiate rather than grate.

Lumborg was recently quoted as saying "I'd like my writing to be a PR job for the human race", which may be why you emerge from One Fine Day feeling that you have been patronised with something less than the truth.

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