First let me be an honest reporter and acknowledge that a packed house evidently loved this show, to judge from the number of people on their feet, clapping along, at the end.

But I'm afraid I thought it was complete dross, despite the Olivier Award it won in 2003 - evidently not a great year for musicals.

Our House is described as a "Madness musical", but this is misleading because apart from borrowing and ruining a handful of their songs, it has nothing at all to do with the popular 1980s ska combo. Suggs and Co might have had a rough-and-ready, good-time image, but their best songs have a wit and charm which go missing completely here, so that they end up sounding like standard music-theatre pap.

What the author Tim Firth seems to have been aiming for is a kind of London-based Blood Brothers, and he certainly succeeds in so far as demonstrating that Scousers have no monopoly on sentimentality.

Once again we have the single working class mother with a heart of gold, but instead of twins separated at birth there is a single young man, Joe, with a divided personality.

After his split-second decision whether to stay or run when the police corner him and his posh girlfriend in a flat they've broken into, the show has two different narratives running side-by-side, working out the consequences of his choice.

In the place of Blood Brothers' narrator we have X Factor winner Steve Brookstein prowling around irritatingly as the ghost of Joe's jailbird dad, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.

Let's admit that there's some nifty stagecraft and some impressively quick changes in switching between the two Joes, and Chris Carswell, in his first professional role, brings it off pretty well.

But it really is difficult to care about what happens to these cardboard stereotypes of working class lads, neighborhood villains and evil property developers. Our House may not quite plumb the now legendary depths of the Rep's "UB40 musical" Promises and Lies, but it's depressing enough in its own right.