70s archive footage of muscly young men in too-tight shirts, Tommy Cooper wobbling across an ice rink and Eric Morecambe clowning around with dodgems in the background play out in the orangey/turquoisey tones of the decade on a centre-stage screen as we enter the space. The Libertines swell through the speakers – it’s an old song I love and the anachronistic montage effectively triggers the nostalgia it seems set to evoke. Most of us have had budget beach holidays in the less loved corners of the English coast, and a show that seems made to celebrate these places appeals to the dog-eared memories of our childhood.

This nostalgic flavour is definitely one performer John Osborne is reaching for, but sadly, after those first few moments, it never really materialises. It’s also never clear why we start in the 70s, before shifting to the story of one escapist lunch break in 2012, via touching on some childhood memories of the early 90s. Perhaps a sense that the glamour of the seaside comes from those halcyon 70s summers? Flashes of the storytelling – a family cricket game, an old couple sharing a punnet of strawberries – evoke a certain timelessness. At other times we’re simply not clear where, or when in the memories we are. This isn’t helped by Osborne’s somewhat relentless delivery, which hits the rhythm of performance poetry, with its emphatic end lines, but without real colour, making it feel leaden and, yes, rather boring.

The show is not quite one thing or another. The writing, though clearly heartfelt and peppered with some flashes of striking imagery, lacks the muscle and dynamics of good performance poetry. The staging – one man on a stool next to an inadequately lit screen – is too flat for theatre. And I felt simply frustrated that it wasn’t done better. A little direction could have added some light and shade to Osborne’s delivery. The video footage, used to add flavour at certain interludes, needed at the very least to maintain the illusion of having been created for the show and not extracted by an online Google search. When Osborne tell us, with new seriousness, ‘I realised then that I had given up on life’, it feels like a platitude, not a confession – he hasn’t earned that seriousness.

This is a sweet and sincere show, but one that simply needs more – more time, more commitment, and a bit more thought about what it wants to do. Its publicity had earned an audience ready for a poetic trip down the sandy avenues of memory lane, but what was on offer was more of a sandy sandwich whose different parts were disintegrating in the heat.