Mixed bag of 1980s nostalgia

THE Unnamed Theatre Company's latest show is a curiosity, to say the least.

Eight actors present modern life based on, and because of, the movies of John Hughes.

The director, you might recall, made a series of highly regarded cult, teen-orientated 80s films that spoke volumes to anyone growing up alongside the characters in them. Movies such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles and Weird Science.

Unnamed presents not a coherent play but a series of sketches written by group members. The viewer is supposed to, presumably, take away from the experience what they can; that experience being concerned with the legacy of the 80s in the present - reflective, keen, imaginative and above all willing to tell authority figures to go to hell if the occasion demands.

The problem is the execution isn't up to the sometimes interesting ideas.

Of ten episodes - some using characters from the films, some referring to them - most are rather rough and forgettable.

The first, for example, is a series of fragments and ideas from growing up in the 80s that are frankly tedious but delivered with the quiet pomposity of a minor poet reciting his own work.

There's an interesting sketch to follow about the tedious business of work appraisals, here applied to being a fairy godmother, but the balance between the good lines is a little skewed and the result uneven.

And so it goes; shoulder pads offering great power and authority, an amusing but introverted piece about the emotional impairments of the inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood, a Judge Judy episode in which the home invaders of Home Alone sue for the injuries dished out by the young Macaulay Culkin, and a Breakfast Club-style item about those high school kids meeting again 15 years on and being just as screwed up.

The best piece - and rudest - comes in the second act as love and sex are reduced to a neatly-argued proposition between male and female friends embarking coldly on an affair.

They are both pretty calculating and dreadful, but as examples of the callous selfishness of the 80s, they're pretty accurate.