The play's the thing

Last night I saw a certain show at a certain theatre. I won't name names as it wasn't the greatest show I've ever seen. Ok ok, so it was like watching paint dry, but without the fumes. It was set in a bookshop for goodness sake! A bookshop? Why on earth would you set a two and a quarter hour play solely in a frickin' bookshop? The first third of the play was so dull, I would honestly have rather watched them re-alphabetise the romance section for an hour. Then a girl comes in to the story and the Plot starts to Thicken. Ooh, we think, who can this girl possibly be? For about 30 seconds, then it becomes patently obvious it's his daughter. At which point the writer tries to throw us off with incredibly deceptive red herrings like 'I never knew my mother, although... I have met my father...' If she'd have had a beard she'd be stroking it. But the most unforgivable sin of the play was a character who leads a secluded life in a locked room upstairs, making dark remarks about forthcoming marches with fundamentalist Somalians and soliloquising that 'sometimes you have to hurt innocent people in order to get things done'. The tension builds and builds as we start constructing some sort of huge terrorist plot this evil guy is about to unleash on the world. At one point he's caught with a whole box of hair lotion! and we're thinking wait! maybe he's gonna make a hairspray bomb! Or some sort of straightening strangling gas! Does that work? Does it have the same explosive qualities as fertiliser? Shudder! What SuperCrime could he possibly be about to perpetrate? Well, actually, he is planning to, and I kid you not here, open a salon. That's right, a HAIRDRESSERS! His dark secret is that he has 50 boxes of Frizz-Ease stuffed away in the attic and he's prepared to sell them! Sell them all!! Wahaha! Kill me.