HAVING fashioned the musings of Quentin Crisp and the columnist Julie Burchill into solo stage turns, Tim Fountain has now done the same for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a memoir about naked ambition and self-conscious ineptness by the journalist Toby Young. Back in 1995, he set out to take Manhattan, or take the mickey if this account is anything to go by.

Young’s book charts how this self-styled “streetwise kid from the Home Counties” got a job as a contributing editor at the posh American glossy Vanity Fair. He then spent the next two years becoming a social outcast by failing to treat the style gurus and A-listers of the New York magazine scene with fawning respect. Whether he’s asking a Broadway star if he’s gay, sending a stripper to the office on what turns out to be Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, or getting drunk as he fails to bed some “high-grade totty”, Young promotes himself as a starstruck loser.

“Popular culture was my religion and Hollywood was my Mecca,” he informs us, though here, in this hour-long show, it’s the tall, dashing Jack Davenport who tells us, rather than the self-confessed William Hague lookalike Young. Early on we hear how he gatecrashed an Oscar-night party. In the book you get some sense of the giddiness that comes when you’re in the orbit of the stars just as they are intoxicated with each other. On stage it comes across as simply another anecdote of a hack behaving badly that probably goes down a storm over drinks in the media haunts of Soho.

A bespectacled Davenport, dressed in pinstripes and an open-necked shirt, delivers an entertaining turn as if Austin Powers were doing stand-up. When not embodying Young, he’s also such figures as Graydon Carter, the high and mighty Editor of Vanity Fair, and the self-important magazine’s acolytes of humour-free PRs and socialites.

But this slackly strung-together piece fails to build into a fresh take on the allure and vanities of celebrity. Nor does it convince as the ultimately chastening experience that Young wants us to see.

The show ultimately turns self-deprecation into an ego trip and will probably appeal only to anyone who is desperate to have a script optioned by Miramax or finds funny the idea of profiling Will Self as a writer who’s “elusive and publicity-shy”. No wonder that Owen Lewis’s production is playing within staggering distance of the Groucho Club.

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