4000 Days, Park Theatre, London, review: Alistair McGowan executes a skilful portrait of an amnesiac

Alistair McGowan awakes from a coma to discover that his memory of the preceding 11 years has been wiped clean

Alistair McGowan in 4000 Days (Rory Lindsay )

After his indelible performance in An Audience With Jimmy Savile at this address, it says a lot for Alistair McGowan's loyalty to the Park and his desire to extend his theatrical range that he has chosen to return to the venue in this comparatively low-key project. Peter Quilter's three-hander kicks off from a promising premise. McGowan plays Michael, a former painter, who awakes from a three-week coma to discover that his memory of the preceding 11 years has been wiped clean. He remembers nothing about Paul, his partner for the past ten years, whose hurt, confusion and understanding are sensitively conveyed by Daniel Weyman. Set entirely in his hospital room, the plays charts the battle for Michael's soul between Paul who's struggling to help him recover his memory of the missing period and his formidable thrice-married mother Carol (Maggie Ollerenshaw) who has other plans.

“There is no greater love than that between a mother and his son,” declares Carol who prides herself on looking people stonily in the eye: “See what they're made of. Presuming they are made of anything at all”. She's never liked what's seen in Paul whom she blames for persuading Michael to give up painting. It's clear that his career was going nowhere but it would take Paul more time and trust than is now available to explain this properly. Meanwhile in the interests of engineering a second chance for herself as well as for Michael, Carol openly vilifies Paul in front of her son (“You painted him beige”) for allegedly dragging him down to his own boring level. Soon Michael is reconnecting with his artistic self (daubing a sub-Kandinsky mural in his hospital room) and raving over the delights of creativity. Well, if it gives him pleasure...

4000 Days (Rory Lindsay)

McGowan executes a skilful portrait of a man who seems to have reverted to an earlier stage of evolution as a camp, self-centred mother's boy with a winning line in slightly precious charm and conspiratorial cheek. He starts off treating his partner as a tiresome pest. But Paul awakens his affection – and triggers flashbacks to their former life – when he generously concedes that, on reflection, he too may have a distorted take on the past, idealising the memories that Michael has forgotten. He sets his partner free to take a second chance (Weyman handles this sequence beautifully), thereby perhaps changing it from the one Carol had in mind.

Ollerenshaw is splendidly unflinching but it's a pity that the play buys so heavily into the stereotype of the lonely, possessive woman battening on the life of her gay son. Matt Aston's production can't smooth the bumps of tone between sitcom and something subtler. There's a revealing moment early on when Michael comes back from being assisted at the urinals by an attractive male nurse and titters about “wedding bells”. Terribly tactless, given Paul's presence. And strange that in all the talk of the changes in the past decade, botox and Strictly Come Dancing feature but not gay marriage. At such points, the play itself feels amnesiac.