2015MIDNIGJ_P3Only a very specific kind of person wanders the streets of cities in the early hours of the morning: people with nowhere to go or people who have somewhere to go but don’t want to be there. For these lost wanderers of Milton Keynes, the Midnight Café is their refuge.

It’s a fairly neat concept and could work, and Midnight Café deals with an interesting cross-section of the class system. People who are wandering the streets at 3am instead of sleeping will always have some story to tell. As one character puts it, “night is nature telling us to go to sleep, and yet we force ourselves awake with caffeine”. So there could be a lot to say here, and some compelling stories to delve into.

Midnight Café just leaves way too much unsaid. It’s never explained how one perfectly sane-seeming character can then shoot a stranger in the head just for some ID. Which is pretty far-fetched, even by melodramatic standards. Even then, attention to detail is an important thing, and it seems to have been lost here. Such as the fact that people rarely fall towards the gun when they’re shot. We also literally never see how a woman makes this shocking leap to being both suicidal and murderous, and I leave feeling like I’ve accidentally missed half of the play.

We have a framework of interesting characters: a girl who feels inferior compared to her twin; a homeless man and his estranged sister; and our waitress, who sort of acts as our host for the evening. But it all seems a bit too cliché; we’ve seen all these types before. And what is it with always depicting the working class as being angry, wealthy-people loathing and constantly bitter towards life?

Midnight Café has the ingredients to be a fascinating insight into a band of dysfunctional characters, but too much is left to our imagination, so we’re left filling in the blanks.

Midnight Café is playing at Paradise in the Vault (venue 29) until 30 August. For more information, visit the Fringe website.