The Argus: Brighton Festival Fringe launches today

Sponge cakes are a metaphor for consumer greed and credit measured out in coffee spoons in Ben Aitken’s The Café, which explores political discontent through the microcosm of a struggling café.

Into an environment where courgettes can never be chopped too finely and staff gratuities are “commercially redirected” comes Richard Rowe-McGhie’s Joe, a waiter and would-be firebrand determined to impose some Marxist values on the dejected workers, if only he could get up in time.

But jobs are scarce – manager Marcus (Paul Lincoln) sneers that he papers his bathroom in people’s CVs – and Joe’s half-baked attempts to stir his colleagues into action end only in a temper tantrum and some seriously petty theft.

Aitken has some good ideas, especially in highlighting the myriad conflicts of modern life – the independent’s fight against the multinational, the fashion for organic produce against the cost, and youthful idealism against age and resignation.

But his play is in need of editing; the text is too dense and the cast overloaded with dialogue. In attempting to cover so much ground, it suffers from a lack of depth. Characters appear little more than a vehicle for the political points Aitken wishes to make and these are often muddled and overwrought.

It’s difficult to imagine conversations like these going on anywhere outside a student common room, let alone in a busy café, harder still to picture staff solemnly standing by while John Lennon’s Working Class Hero is played to a petulant waiter.

The real-life café setting, while novel, is not used to its full potential and putting certain scenes behind the audience is downright daft. There’s a delicious irony however, in the roaring trade Metrodeco does… in sponge cake.