A romcom with an irritating title, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, has opened at the HP Theatre starring Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. Telly addicts will recognise their names. They play two London yuppies, Oliver and Bernadette, who are struggling to communicate properly. Out of nowhere, the state imposes a gruesome new ‘Hush Law’ that forbids citizens from uttering more than 140 words a day.

All kinds of questions arise. Why was the Big Hush introduced? Whose interest does it serve? How is it policed? By overstepping your quota of natter, are you committing a civil or a criminal offence? Why can’t you rely on texts, emails, sign language, Morse Code or semaphore? What about smoke signals? Oliver is a jingle writer so he’s barely affected by the new prohibition but Bernadette works as a lawyer and it’s unclear how she practises without the power of speech. The writer solves these problems by ignoring them which makes the play feel contrived and false. Artistically, his device looks nuts. A play is a work of oratory and to inflict aphasia on the characters is self-sabotage.

The show is nice to look at, the performers are attractive and they wring a few giggles from the lighthearted script. Nothing much happens on stage. They witter about the usual thirty-something stuff. Let’s have babies. Maybe we should split up. Have you been seeing your ex? Their on-off romance might belong to a BBC sitcom from the 1990s but that hardly justifies a West End run. The writer seems to have added the chatterbox crackdown to lend a bit of socio-political ballast to a weightless relationship drama. The thing is harmless enough but impossible to get fired up about. It lasts just 85 minutes and you’ll have forgotten you saw it by the time you get home.

How Not To Drown is the tale of an Albanian migrant, Dritan, who lands in the UK as a schoolboy in the early 1990s. His father belongs to a gangster family so he crosses Europe without much difficulty and he reaches England by breaking into a lorry. That’s when his problems start. Not because the UK lacks charity but because Dritan is a needy, hysterical nuisance. He behaves like a pampered influencer, demanding freebies galore and offering nothing in return.

The script, which he co-wrote, resembles one of those demented Tripadvisor rants by a lunatic customer trying to put a hotelier out of business. He resents his foster family because his lodgings are insufficiently luxurious. The spicy food he’s given displeases him. He complains that he doesn’t receive the right kind of affection. Wherever he goes he causes trouble. He fights with his foster siblings and with kids in the playground who mock his Muslim heritage and call him ‘towelhead’ and ‘terrorist’ even though he doesn’t practise Islam or wear Arabic clothing. On stage he repeats these jibes with a horrified blush as if the Balkans were a stranger to ethnic division.

The list of moans never stops. His foster parents are ‘pigs’. The British are filthy because their cars are less than spotless. When the headteacher threatens to expel him he uses the only English he knows – abusive swearing. After years of violence, he’s persuaded to give up fighting by a Caribbean schoolmate who tells him that conflict ‘is what They want’. The term ‘They’ means the UK authorities, apparently, and Dritan accepts this dotty argument because it feeds his persecution mania. He’s too pea-brained to ask himself why the UK would ‘want’ a thuggish Albanian to spread violence wherever he goes while enjoying free hospitality, education and healthcare. And he forgets that his father poisoned his mind against the British before he left home. ‘Learn from them,’ counselled dad, ‘but don’t become like them.’

Aged 16, he discovers that his foster family receive payments on his behalf so he throws a hissy fit and flounces off back to Albania. And guess what? He hates that as well. His parents have become strangers to him and he’s outraged to find that his sister has given birth. ‘A slap in the face’ is how he describes his baby nephew.

Returning to Britain he picks a fight with an immigration officer who dares to suggest that since Albania is safe to visit, his asylum claim may be bogus. It’s hard to know what to make of this graceless, petulant halfwit and his dreary, pig-headed play. At press night the crowd whooped and cheered as if Dritan’s story were a glorious tale of survival. But it feels like a groundless attack on the character and culture of Albania. Surely they can’t all be as aggressively dim as this self-pitying loser. Either Dritan should be persuaded to cancel the show or the Albanian ambassador should issue a statement distancing his government from this slur on his homeland.