Skip to main content
Logo of Time Out
Home
Dale Smith Online

Time Out review

  • Write Fan Fiction
    • Cosmic Masque
    • Back From the Dead
    • Charity Anthologies
    • Myth Makers
    • Shelf Life
  • Enter Competitions
    • Hello?
    • A Night on the Tiles
    • Skin Deep
  • Send Out Stories
    • Brief Encounters
    • A Northamptonshire Tale
    • Heritage
    • The Albino's Dancer
    • The Panda Book of Horror
    • In Uniform
    • The Black Archive #58
    • Joy
    • The Black Archive #66
    • Arthur
  • Get Rejected
    • Wolfsong
    • Kaldor City
    • Time, Unincorporated
  • Get Asked to Write
    • The Kissing Game
    • The Lunatic
    • The Solar System
    • Red
    • Collected Works
    • Time and Relative Dissertations in Space
    • Cut
    • The Many Hands
    • Transmissions
    • Wildthyme in Purple
    • Tales of the City
    • Iris Wildthyme of Mars
    • Big Finish Short Trips
    • The Perennial Miss Wildthyme
    • Spinning Jenny
    • Build High For Happiness
    • Locked In Space
Utility menu

Breadcrumb

  1. Home
  2. Get Asked to Write
  3. The Kissing Game
  4. Reviews
  5. Time Out

As we all know, it doesn’t stop at kissing. ‘More? It’s not a telescope’ says he, knackered. A straight virgin, who’s never injected or even borrowed a toothbrush finds himself HIV+ after his first shag (its only his girlfriend’s second). So, beware of puppy-love because kissing will lead to AIDS as surely as ‘baccy leads to heroin addiction. Well, bollocks, frankly.

Playwright Dale Smith is only nineteen yet manages to patronise kids younger and less classy than he is. He’s a bit of a new lad (aka an old chauvinist): ‘Margarine legs? Easily spread’; girls are a throwback: ‘birds’ and boys: ‘mate’. Smith doesn’t have the precision of, say Iain Heggie whose Glasgow shorts “The Sex Comedies” distil inarticulate language into communicative patterns (‘Can you fuck - the fuck you can - the fuck it is - is it fuck’) Smith overstretches in two hours what boils down to a couple of minutes character sketches.

The (improvised?) dialogue lacks spontaneity: ‘Are you stoopid or sumfink?’ and it doesn’t posses the the ring of truth of, say, ‘Eastenders’ Sandip moaning to Gi’a: ‘Wot yor marf do for exercise before it had me to slag off, eh?’. Danny Newman and Emma Owen-Smith invest their performances as bird and a mate apiece with some emotion, but not much depth. You pity them enduring a snogathon without the chance of a dramatic orgasm.

Simon Reade

Tags

    • reviews
Logo of Time Out

Main (primary) menu

Share me:

Mastodon icon

Footer menu

  • About me
  • Contact Me
  • Copyright
  • Search
Drupal icon
Goodreads icon
Mastodon icon