Jonathan Coote in A Kingdom for a Stage Photo: Charlene Segeral

As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death Tony Diggle's new play imagines that the Bard is still around, sort of. He's in a writers limbo between heaven and hell.

There is an intimidating cockney Angel Gabriel (Christopher Knott) who keeps Shakespeare (Jonathan Coote) and fellow writers Ben Johnson (Alex Murphy), Christopher Marlowe (Edwin Wright) and George Bernard Shaw (Richard Ward) in line while Puck (Sue Appleby) tries to keep them out of line. Shakespeare, with Pucks help, wants to visit earth to see The Globe and check out his legacy and what he sees whilst there inspires him to write a new play much to the dismay of the other writers.

This is all well and good but in addition to the action flitting between 'heaven' and earth, Diggle also takes us back in time to Shakespeare as a young man (Dan Wheeler) on the cusp of success and then, later on, at the end of his life. Here we see Shakespeare conflicted between creative success and being at home where his family need him.

And here lies the problem. The individual elements are in themselves fine but as a collective it creates a play of such diverse tone that it is difficult to make out what exactly Diggle is trying to convey. When Shakespeare makes it to earth he quickly realises that certain things have not changed in 400 years but this feels almost perfunctory amid everything else that is going on.