IT starts at the end, with potty pop producer Joe Meek's last two hits on February 3, 1967, the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly's death.

A policeman is asking Meek's right-hand man, Patrick Pink (Roland Manookian), what happened. Landlady Violet Shenton (Linda Robson) has been shot; Meek is dead too. The summer of love was just around the corner but Meek, up to his eyeballs in amphetamine abuse and debt, was completing the course of what writer Nick Moran calls a latter-day Greek tragedy.

Moran, the Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels star, and co-writer James Hicks retell the seven-year cycle of Meek's music, mayhem and madness in the rise and fall of the Telstar from 1961 to 1967. "He was the king of rock'n'roll, with the fatal flaw, who ended up killing himself," says Moran.

Rather than a musical, Telstar is a play with shards of music in the making. It is part Greek drama, with oft disgruntled or bemused band members as the Greek chorus, and part kitchen-sink drama, capturing how Meek (Con O'Neill), the gay, introverted, former radar technician and TV engineer from Gloucester, improvised a recording studio out of his flat above a handbag shop in Holloway Road, North London.

Moran's research has been thorough and precise, interviewing the likes of Patrick Pink and Chas Hodges (later of Chas 'n' Dave fame), and Tim Shortall's set design immaculately recreates those neighbour-annoying cramped conditions wherein Meek worked his innovative magic on second-hand equipment.

Post-interval, Meek's world crumbles around him, blighted by his inability to update his sound and his financial incompetence, and Con O'Neill excels again as an increasingly tortured soul in Paul Jepson's raw, uncompromising production. Do catch a fallen Telstar.

Box office: 0870 606 3590

Updated: 11:20 Wednesday, February 09, 2005