The Company of Strangers is billed as a “surreal, dark comedy about lost dreams” centred around the titular strangers gathered at “life’s final outpost, the Restmore Nursing Home”. With an extravagant running time of roughly two and a half hours (it feels longer), this play would be more aptly described as an unenjoyable, dated and maudlin tragicomedy set in an excellently-rendered nursing home.

If there’s one thing you can’t fault, it is the set design. David Harris does a fantastic job, with a sharp eye for drab detail: from the How Do You Like Your Coffee? chart on the muted pastel wall, through to the cheap, faded armchairs and health and safety stickers. So far, so depressing.

Written and directed by Carol Bunyan, the premise of the play is intriguing and has plenty of potential to be as dark and disturbing as it aims to be. The nursing home setting is prime fodder for raising questions about our mortality and the health and social care industry, the marginalisation of the elderly and infirm as well as the bleakness of institutionalism – nearing the end of the life, is this where you would want to be? The “war of attrition” between the two authority figures – the Senior Nurse (Alan Charlesworth) and the Matron (Imogen Bain) – also seems promising.

Yet Bunyan draws nothing new nor genuinely evocative from her interesting premise. What you get, instead, is a skirting of fresh conclusions or thorny issues, in favour of drawing room melodrama which would not look out of place as either a soap opera or British sitcom from the seventies. The jokes are stale and their contextual references stuck at least a decade in the past – although this is entirely subjective and you might very well love the humour if you are a diehard fan of the original Upstairs, Downstairs series and think a “modem” is a small mammal.

The only “surreal” elements of the work seem to emerge rather patly when Nick the Senior Nurse (Charlesworth, doing a commendable job of trying to bring genuine humour and dignity to a one-note Tortured Soul character) goes into trancelike flashbacks (complete with mood lighting) about his guilt over a death he caused. If the details were kept a little more unusual or ambiguous it might have sufficed to anchor the play in a central mystery and keep the audience semi-conscious for the duration of the running time, but as it was his trauma is both predictable and quickly given away.

Bains, as the shrill and cranky Matron, commits fully to her role of the stereotypical Lonely Middle-Aged Woman trawling singles columns and lying about her hobbies and weight. There are the slightest moments of convincing bitterness and longing in her dialogue-  “I could be your Mum, I could be anyone’s Mum,” she intones to Rebecca Farrell’s smirking teenage character. However, these sympathetic facets are supplanted by Matron’s over-the-top histrionics and quivery, slapstick humour.

I found the presence of Anny Tobin and John Fleming as a cabaret duo both forced and fairly negligible (and also cringe worthy). Aaron Mwale and Farrell fare slightly better as the bored, reluctant work experience students – Mwale brings an endearing vulnerability to his surliness, and Farrell acquits herself well as a convincing, hair-tossing teenager. However, the clumsy transition of the two teenagers from mutual resentment toward falling in love utterly lacks believability and reduces the two characters to nothing more than caricatures: Sensitive Young People Who Will Fall in Love and Learn Valuable Life Lessons from Older Folk.

Apart from the excellent set design, Derek Wright as Ken the octogenerian is the single best element about the whole play. He is completely convincing in his part and retains a level of grace and sanguine detachment throughout the trite, overlong proceedings. With a single fumble for his walking aid, he articulates all of the physical frailty, isolation and frustration one gets from growing old with more subtlety and conviction than close to three hours of hackneyed dialogue possibly could.