Theatre review: A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR Minerva, Chichester

The Devil has a neat trick in Alan Ayckbourn's A Word from Our Sponsor. With a flick of the satanic fingers, s/he can, if s/he so desires, fast-forward any of the songs from the Nativity musical the human cast are rehearsing. One second a lone singer is urging you to "imagine it like this", the next, an entire arms-out ensemble is grouped on a staircase, climactically telling you to "imagine it like that!". There is a snag with the joke, though, as you find yourself envying the Devil this ability during several of the songs you are meant to appreciate in full.

The show is set in a bleak near-future in a defunct railway station through which only transcontinentals, like the Istanbul-Dumfries, deafeningly hurtle. It is the meeting place for a group of familiar Ayckbourn types (a dithering vicar, a train-spotting chemist, a lovelorn spinster, and a punkette with a brain implant that gives her round-the-clock rock) who want to strike a blow for superseded Christian values by mounting a musical Mystery play. The vicar's prayer for funding gets intercepted by the Devil who materialises in both male and female form, as Kate Arneil's Valda and Dale Rapley's Valder. Offering pounds 50,000, s/he is literally the arts sponsor from hell.

Ayckbourn wrests some mildly amusing, if fairly obvious satire from the hoofs-on interference that results. Pandering to modern prejudices for profit, the Devil demands they make the PC gesture of turning baby Jesus into a girl called Jasmine. But A Word from Our Sponsor cannot decide whether it wants to be about the struggle between good and evil or about the perils of private funding. In trying to merge the two subjects, it resorts to equating arts sponsorship not just with evil but with Evil. This conveniently glosses over the fact that there are good sponsors and that it is government that exposes the arts to the philistinism of the bad ones.

The Devil certainly has the best tunes. In the sassily baleful "It's getting darker every dawn", John Pattison's music manages to rouse itself from its pallid, faintly sub-Sondheim uninventiveness. Peter Forbes is appealing as the flustered, good-natured vicar whose acceptance of the tainted money puts in jeopardy his tentative romance. The show is undermined, though, by some serious errors of judgement, not least the unearned, fraudulent uplift of the final chorus "We can do it!", the one thing in this Devil- haunted piece that is definitively diabolical.

n To 8 July. Booking: 01243 781312