IT shows a certain nerve to call your first play Art and Guff. Catherine Tregenna's account of two young Welsh lads on the make in lonely, mean London couldn't really be classified as "art", but, though it contains a fair bit of juvenile blather, nor can it be dismissed as "guff". It falls somewhere in between, at times resembling a bottom-drawer sitcom pilot, at others declaring itself as a stirring theatrical debut.
There's nothing particularly startling about Tregenna's choice of subject matter and much that is familiar about these struggling bohemians - Art fancies himself as a screenwriter, Guff as a poet. Withnail and I is the genre's golden example and the fringe often yields navel-gazing pieces from aspiring, twentysomething writers. What makes this so watchable, however, is Tregenna's grasp of the minuter details of the male psyche.
She catches the childish humour, the inattention to cleanliness, the pub repartee - but she also taps the failure to communicate. Menaced by a prowling, heartless hippy couple from downstairs, Art drinks his way towards a nervous breakdown.
Bethan Jones's production has its longueurs, but thrives on the touchingly authentic rapport between Richard Harrington's prematurely wrecked Art and Roger Evans's mindlessly breezy Guff. The daffiness of the two Taffs is lovingly accentuated, but anyone who has had bad days in the Big Smoke will see themselves in this clingy pair.
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