CHARLIE Conrad has it all. A beautiful wife, Linzi, who had her 15 minutes on children's television; two adoring children; advertising contracts, designer-label wealth and a magnificent Georgian house.

Yet Charlie (Stephen Beckett) is an Eddie the Eagle for the age of Posh and Becks, his media fame built on the straw of no talent. He was a failed athlete and useless quiz contestant who struck a chord with the British through charming incompetence.

He had "it"; now he's had it, his seven years of plenty are just about to turn to seven years of lean in Alan Ayckbourn's 66th play, a wry study of media-driven society in which he ponders whether anything any more is what it seems.

Symbolically, Ayckbourn uses the setting of a garden folly, his latest inspired use of the physical possibilities of the Stephen Joseph Theatre stage and back-stage, courtesy of writer-director Ayckbourn's imagination and Roger Glossop's design. The folly, an echoing tower, has (unseen) steps that give off the illusion of climbing and descending when in reality they never change level.

Charlie's marriage has become an illusion too: he sees more of his agent, Jason Ratcliffe (Adrian McLoughlin) than his bored trophy wife (Melanie Gutteridge in Posh-lite mode), and today his diary of priorities places an interview with a bloodsucking TV interviewer Gale Gilchrist, (Billie-Claire Wright), above son Horsham's sixth birthday party with a children's entertainer, Mr Chortles.

When Charlie is caught in flagrant, pulling down the comedy bloomers of the clown - who in reality is his number one fan, Marsha Bates (Sarah Moyle) - he is in deep do-do, as his hotshot lawyer puts it. Up to this point, Drowning On Dry Land had been a satire on Hello-era fame without the vicious hooks of sceptic Ayckbourn's earlier attack on media morality in 1988's Man Of The Moment. The opening of David Hare's The Permanent Way had made the same zeitgeist points, if more concisely.

Where Man Of The Moment's Vic Parks was a bank-robbing gangster (turned TV star), 2004's man of the moment, Charlie Conrad, is essentially a decent innocent abroad, one of life's club runners catapulted into a voracious, hyped world of much ado about nothing. The media has had its fill of him; now it is the turn of another word-spinning vulture, the legal profession, to play matador to his wounded bull.

In Stuart Fox's Hugo de Prscourt, Ayckbourn has created one of his great cameo turns, a lawyer schooled in Rumpole and George Carman as he turns Marsha's accusation of indecent assault on its head in a dazzling display of forensic logic that has you wishing for more of him. Instead, Ayckbourn returns to "yesterday's people", the fallen Charlie and blown-out Gale, in a surprisingly soft finale.

Updated: 11:35 Wednesday, May 05, 2004