SHORT play, short run, but nevertheless this is a worthwhile introduction to the burgeoning writing talents of Rodney Clark, who spent his earlier career figuring out life as a merchant banker in Japan.

Until now, his plays - 1985's Made In England, 1997's My Native Land and this year's Moving Susan - have been performed only in the south. However, with the support of Timothy West and Prunella Scales, Clark's voice can be heard in the north for the first time.

The External has been mounted by the Theatre Royal, Bath, and Greenwich Theatre, but the husband-and-wife team of West and Scales have been stalwart and active supporters of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, hence the Clark play has pitched camp in Leeds for five nights.

It is, as this review began by saying, a short play, albeit 80 minutes rather than the 70 stated on the Courtyard Theatre's running-time clock, but The External certainly didn't out-stay its welcome by going beyond its stated boundary. Here is distilled writing, with the fullest flavour retained, and here is drama compact, compelling and concentrated.

The External is a new addition to the litany of dramas rooted in the halls of academia, different again from John Godber's or Tom Stoppard's works, or Porterhouse Blue and Educating Rita. Clark's three-hander involves Jake Broder's chip-shouldered Dr David Colt being summoned from one of those red-brick polytechnics now dressed up as a university to be the young external examiner - the 'External' of the title - for an M Phil thesis at the old-school university from which he was once excluded and rejected by dint of his A-Level results falling short of the required level.

The thesis is similarly sub-standard but there is a catch. On arrival, the coltish Colt learns he is being asked by department head Dr Anne Hanson (a stoic Prunella Scales) to participate in an unscrupulous manoeuvre to save the reputation of the social philosophy department's heavy-drinking leading light, Professor Sir Edgar Naseby (Timothy West, in one of his dishevelled corduroy and battered-jacket turns).

The female student, the never-seen Jane Collier, has flunked her paper deliberately in response to her affair with the professor going pear-shaped. Should the thesis be failed, she could always spill the beans to the press claiming 'revenge' was behind the thumbs-down.

The plot thickens, and so do the characters, and each new revelation, not least of Sir Edgar's sad personal life, shifts sympathies. Clark's writing is darkly comic, waspish but tender too, and if some of his wordplay - "malpractice makes imperfect" comes to mind - is a little too arch, The External is a fascinating, intricate study of class and academic distinction, rejection, compromise, and principle among the principals. A-grade material, in fact.

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