Hunter and Johnny

This is a production on speed—fast-paced and twice as large as life—which is fitting really, because the same can be said of its characters.

There's Johnny Depp the actor—stylish, slight, a little fey—and there's Hunter S. Thompson the journalist - gun toting, heroin shooting, iconoclastic. A classic odd couple. For four months the pair live together as Johnny prepares to play Hunter in the movie version of the latter's classic novel-cum-memoir Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It is on their real life association that Adam El Hagar and Sam Coulson, writers and stars of Hunter and Johnny, base their play.

El Hagar may not quite have Depp's cheekbones but he gives a charismatic performance as an overwhelmed young Depp, naturally strait-laced but trying not to appear too priggish or killjoy. Coulson in the role of Hunter arguably has the harder job: he has to find the human in a man who has become a parody of himself. This Coulson manages with some skill, gradually revealing a figure both kinder and lonelier than the lurid overlay.

Thompson became infamous for his "gonzo" journalism, a term which the programme helpfully defines as "denoting a style exaggerated, subjective, and fictionalised." It is an aesthetic to which the clever and witty script adheres, with frequent nods towards the surreal or post-modern. However, in a nice twist, it is Johnny who becomes the gonzo as it is he, and not Hunter, who relates the unexpectedly touching story of their relationship.