It’s a brave, brave title. And a lot of people were keen to find out just what exactly was wrong with Angry, because this was the largest audience I’ve seen at a late show for a while.  The answer, unfortunately for them, was quite a bit. Patrick Wilde’s script reeks of First Play Syndrome, its worthy message preached by one-dimensional characters amidst a painfully unfunny script. It would have taken an ingenious production to pull it off, and Jacob Shephard’s direction didn’t hold that kind of compensation.

Daniel Radcliffe’s been the recent pin-up of naked school boys on stage, but here we’re back in 1992, pre-Harry Potter and pre-Sexual Offences Amendment Act of 2000, which finally ruled gay sex at 16 as legal.  Sixteen-year-old Steven Carter has to deal with an age of consent stretching up to 21, alongside crass bullies and a crush on seemingly unattainable head boy John Westhead, who’s harbouring hidden desires of his own. Steven’s mum is determined that sex be ‘something beautiful’, and there’s certainly none of that here. This is a Basingstoke of toilet cubicle encounters and bigoted teachers intent on moulding their school boys into ‘gentlemen’. The exception is Hutton (Adam Lawrence), whose mentoring attempts led to soliloquies rendered banal by inexorable sincerity. He exclaimed ‘Bastards!’ a good dozen times, entering the stage once again to find Steven victimised by thugs in blazers. Yawn.

A nice 90s tackiness was at play, but it was offset a little by the set’s cheap streaks. A lonely Jason Donovan poster is good; a half-painted bed base is not. And the same uncertainty applied to the music. There’s nothing like a blast of ABBA to raise the bitterest critic’s heart, but not when it stops playing several seconds before an actor turns off the stereo. 

Still, laughter wasn’t only for technical bumps. Lowri Amies put in a great performance as Linda, Steven’s dumpy friend and deliverer of the best school disco rejection speech ever to be witnessed. Matt Kilroy’s bumbling Mr Carter, too, was hilarious when walking in on Steven and Linda in a suggestive tangle, all awkward swaying and averted eyes.  Steven, however, was just too grindingly obvious, a melodramatic stereotype of teen angst; James Frecknall’s comic timing seemed a perpetual beat out.  He wasn’t helped by a plethora of the worst sexual innuendos ever to die on stage.  “Don’t rub it in,” John mutters, during one lovers’ tiff.  “Why not?” Steven asks.  “It’s good for the complexion.”  Just think back to your primary school disco, and you’ll know exactly What’s Wrong With Angry. Vengaboys were playing and teachers were standing in the corners; there were some good dramatic moments, but the embarrassments weren’t quite worth it.