- are already visible, and nothing occurs to upset expectations.In the second half, it emerges that Gilly's brother was murdered by racists while with Tink's brother: but with no lead-up or development, that simply feels like an extraneous attempt at tension. When Priya announces in the first scene that it has been three years and Gilly still hasn't told her that he loves her, the outlines of their subsequent row - her demands for commitment, his insistence that he does love her but... Their various dilemmas are laid out rather too plainly, in dialogue that sometimes veers into the over-informative mode of TV soaps, and crucial plot-points are telegraphed in advance or jump out of nowhere. How? Why would she swallow such a flimsy promise? Without such details, it fails to satisfy on the level of the caper.The characters are similarly short on plausible detail. Although it is "inspired by a true crime", the scam is thinly conceived - how do they convert their luxury goods into cash without drawing attention to themselves? Zaq reassures Simmy that, if they are caught, her name will be kept out of it. How can they resist the temptation?Dhingra's writing has many strengths: an easy flow of naturalistic dialogue, an underlying sense of how to shape narrative, and a sense of humour But the play doesn't hold together.
Zaq conceives a foolproof crime: with credit-card details supplied by Simmy, they can tag some inconspicuous spending on to large accounts - preferably celebrities, because it is easier to track their lifestyles and movements and hence to camouflage transactions. As long as their scam goes unnoticed, not only are they safe, but it remains in effect victimless. Tink wants to be a musician but is stuck as a traffic warden. Their Muslim friend Zaq is a genius, but feckless and unemployed. Mark is separated from his wife and child, largely because of rows about money.Along comes Simmy, an old friend of Renu's, who has a well-paid but dull job looking after the accounts of high-profile clients at American Express.
Priya's boyfriend, Gilly, a workaholic journalist, is overlooked by his editors. How could reviewing her latest play not be painful? At the start of The Fortune Club, a group of thirtysomething friends have washed up in a run-down pub on New Year's Eve: Renu, a fluff-headed would-be actress, and her more mature, uptight sister, Priya, have spent their way out of a flat in Hampstead, north London. Even after The Producers the wattage in Drury Lane perceptibly dipped when the team entered into the delirium of Nathan Lane's reception; Mel Brooks's speech seemed anticlimactic.. "Every time a friend succeeds," Gore Vidal wrote, "a little something inside me dies." "Every time a friend succeeds," Gore Vidal wrote, "a little something inside me dies." Dolly Dhingra has been murdering little bits of former colleagues for a decade now: 10 years ago, she was a secretary on this paper's arts section, before striking out to become an award-winning freelance journalist and playwright (she is now playwright-in-residence at the Contact Theatre, Manchester). Payn was panned and the show was a rapid flop.The high-adrenalin moment of the call created a scandal in London, too, after the family chronicle Dear Octopus, when the author, Dodie Smith, came on stage to face an unexpected display of spite from the star Dame Marie Tempest, who was a public favourite but a despotic old trout who had taken against the much younger Smith.There are no comparable on-stage dramas these days One tradition has been creeping back, however.
