When revolutionary Iranian students overran and occupied the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, among the US citizens taken hostage was a drug dealer who more than most would have had cause to wonder what sort of reception he would receive back home when their release was eventually negotiated 444 days later.

It’s this intriguing story that apparently provided the inspiration for Sean Hardie’s similar wrong place, wrong time hostage drama which takes place in an unknown war zone somewhere in Europe.

Here aid worker Rev Thomas Wiley (Alan Steele) is taken hostage by James Young’s zealous young revolutionary idealist, Bobo.

But is our man of the cloth who he says he is? And what about barking (both literally and mentally) dog of war Bobo. How kosher are his credentials?

Sean Hardie doesn’t seem sure whether to make a smoke and mirrors confection of comic misunderstanding here along the lines of Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana or something more dramatically and politically poignant.

In the end he does neither – with the result the piece is a neither fish nor fowl muddle. The comedy is too far in the background to be effective, while the foreground drama is burdened by less than gripping exposition, which Steele and Young’s performances can do little to lift.