A Victorian Eye, at Jermyn Street Theatre Lord Fellowes never felt in competition with his older brothers Nicholas and David. "My problem concerned my third brother, Rory, a figure of immense beauty and glamour who kept me, plain and ungifted as I was, permanently in the shade," the old boy recalled not so long ago. The creator of Downton Abbey need not, I fancy, feel too intimidated by Rory when it comes to the business of writing drama. After spending the past 30 years of his life working in film animation, his "prettier sibling" has fashioned a play about Sir William Blake Richmond, the distinguished but much misunderstood, 19th-century painter whose achievements included the mosaic decorations in St Paul's Cathedral. A Victorian Eye features a good, solid, technically accomplished performance from Nigel Dunbar as Sir William, and it is efficiently directed by Maureen Payne-Hahner. But it still makes for a soporific night of theatre because the playwright commits the cardinal sin of showing precious little, but telling far too much. Indeed, the crushing weight of the biographical information, period detail and editorial comment on the state of the arts world in Sir William's day, which poor old Dunbar has to shoulder, would assuredly break the back of a lesser actor. The Jermyn Street Theatre seems to rather like plays about gifted gentlemen who are out of sync with their times - one thinks, for instance, of last year's The Art of Concealment about Sir Terence Rattigan's later career. In this case, one has every sympathy with Sir William as he rails against the "charlatans" such as Cézanne, and all the other fashionable but "blind" artists of his time. But it all feels too much like cramming for an art history exam for one to become at all emotionally involved. This is a claustrophobic venue at the best of times, and Tim Dann's set - chock-a-block with old frames and paintings and cases that Sir William has in his home - makes it feel all but insufferably so. The one hour and 40 minutes the piece runs seems like a very long time indeed. When Dunbar - alone on the stage throughout, talking directly to the audience - finally reached his last full stop at Tuesday night's performance, the punters, every one of us, remained seated. I'd never seen that happen before. The house manager had to point out after a few minutes that the thing had, at long last, come to an end. I am not sure what it was that kept us in our seats: either a collective coma or Stockholm syndrome.