Review: The Scene at Herald Theatre

Sophie Henderson, as Clea, steals nearly every scene she's in.

The Scene starts with a pop-rock roar and more than a flash of shapely buttock, framed by lace stocking tops and a skimptastic Little Black Dress - at first, this Silo Theatre offering looks like a sex tragicomedy for the Noughties: smokin' hot, fast and funny.

Its four characters are living - but not necessarily enjoying - the literal high life of New York lofts and rooftop hot tubs. They drink, spit out long punchy speeches at 90mph about the necessary pain of "sucking up" to "assholes", and drink some more.

Then in sashays Clea (Sophie Henderson), a brazen young thing from Ohio with an unusual sense of propriety, who asks for water but drinks neat vodka and who sounds like she swallowed a West Coast self-assertion manual whole. Stella, a TV talent wrangler (Josephine Davison), is wrong when she says Clea has "no character" - Clea may be sexy, blonde and vapid but she also possesses the play's most complex personality. The fantastic Henderson could rely on her distracting LBDs to flesh out the part (so to speak), but instead she plays this plum role with aplomb, stealing nearly every scene she's in.

John Parker's bare, sunken-pit set cleverly eliminates the need for obstacles (ie, furniture), while Peter Elliot's direction gracefully finds justifications for the characters to move, adding visual interest to the verbiage - although oddly, he has actors moving through blue light in the pit, making it look like they're walking through water.

Near the end, The Scene's upbeat, white-light energy changes to unconvincing melodrama, as if playwright Theresa Rebeck doesn't trust her smart humour to convey her earnest vision of modern society's vacuous selfishness. The resulting post-feminist haze involves cliches such as punishing Stella for being a breadwinning wife.

It's a pity, because until then The Scene is a blast.