The life and times of young Bob Scallion, Northcott Theatre, Exeter

This production of Mick Martin's The Life and Times of Young Bob Scallion takes place on a bare stage, before a wall covered with satirical drawings of people in the news during the past three decades. The play begins in 1976. Scallion (as in "rap") is 17 and homeless, having been rejected by his family after a prison term for car theft and solvent abuse. He sets out to seek his fortune amid the bright lights of Bradford.

But this po-faced picaresque is as empty as the set. Bob's adventures are feeble – he gets a job sweeping up in a barber shop, he has an affair with a married pillar of the church. When he, rather improbably, saves a local crime boss from assassins, he is given a bed in the attic of a brothel the criminal owns and becomes his dogsbody. Then he hooks up with two even more aimless characters to rob sub-post offices, until the driver of the getaway car forgets to show up.

Martin says he was inspired by a TV adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit and by Tom Jones. He doesn't say whether the latter was the book or the film, but the play seems to owe more to Tony Richardson than to Fielding. Scallion is the narrator of his story as well as its chief actor, and the language in which he addresses the audience is hardly that of an uneducated Borstal boy. Seeing a help-wanted sign in the barber's window, his step is "all the lighter for the opium of hope that trickled through my veins".

If this highfalutin talk is meant to make us think better of Bob, it's misguided – we only think that someone of such intelligence has less cause than most to behave so shabbily. Or is this Martin's idea of the way one has to write for the theatre? He would have done better to have forgone such ancient gags as having Bob declare, "Absolutely not! Under no circumstances! That is final!" when the gangster tells him to row a boat, then, after a momentary blackout, showing him seated in it.

In the title role, Adrian Edmondson's manner is less roll-with-the-punches than sleep-standing-up. Balding and middle- aged, he looks peculiar playing a man 20 or 30 years younger, and gives the piece an air of being much chewed over rather than happening here and now. You don't have to compare this with a work as brilliant as Tom Jones to feel that in recent times English social comedies have, despite setting their sights terribly low, hit really wide of the mark.