Donald Futer’s new play Kings is well suited to the difficult space of Corpus Playroom. The set was the recording studio for Friday Night with Dylan King, a chatshow with the audience cast as the live studio crowd.

The show was opened by the host, Dylan King (Edward Eustace), bounding across the stage in a plum crushed-velvet jacket, nodding and gesturing to the audience, beaming smiles into the cameras, and doing his signature choreographed cymbal hit to the absent studio music. Of course the cameras weren’t rolling, and the whole spectacle had to be repeated.

This was a problem that structured the play: the studio’s cameras reliably faltered in every scene, so that the interview with star actor James Martin (Dominic Biddle) was regularly plunged into darkness. Biddle played an egotistical actor keen to fill every second of his screen time with ‘personality’, made up of faux-philosophizing, self-aggrandizing reminiscences and extravagant body language - when he finally agrees to sit down it is with legs spread and arms flung along the back of his seat. King launched James’s career long ago, but since then their fortunes have reversed: James is sought after in Hollywood while King can barely attract guests to his show.

It is when the lights are down that things get interesting: the clash of egos that was subtext in the live interview becomes outright hostility off the air. Eustace does clench-jawed evasion to perfection: ‘I’m sure no-one wants to hear about my private life...James, the audience came to see you!’

King’s harrassed assistant Sam (Lizzie Schenk) plays a convincing overworked intern. My favourite of her contributions is when she approaches James for an autograph but doesn’t ask her boss for his. She is unyielding to his hints that it would be easy for him to sign too, forcing him to demand, ‘Give that paper here!’ Another memorable moment is when James smarmily tries to ask Sam out after the show and she puts him off with the excuse of coursework. ‘University?’ ‘AS’.

The disintegrating chatshow concept is engaging, but it’s slow to develop. It’s clear from the initial sallies between King and Martin how they stand with each other, and the revelations of King’s waning career and disastrous marital affairs aren’t surprising when they arrive. The Machiavellian Mrs Burrow (Juliet Cameron-Wilson), who informs us at the end that the technical difficulties and disasters of the night can be credited to her, makes a great villain, but one without an obvious motive. The constant lights up/lights down alternation allowed contrasting exchanges between the men but became repetitive and bitty after a while.

Kings has some great lines and acting and an unusual and effective set-up, but the unvarying action left me underwhelmed.