I have known for some years that Terry
Johnson is a talented director, particularly of dark and clever
comedies. However, I had never before realised quite how precise and
gifted he is. In his revival of
Dead
Funny he can, and regularly does, turn the course of events or
the mood of a scene right around, pivoting on the merest inflection or
the most fleeting pause.
It helps, of course, that he knows the play in such detail. After all,
he wrote it, in 1994, and set it a couple of years earlier in the few
days when comedians Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd both died. Fan group
the Dead Funny Society hold a memorial party for Hill, only to find
that the derisory turnout of five consists of two couples whose
marriages are tested to the very point of destruction and a middle-aged
man whose coming-out declaration in the midst of everything else seems
utterly insignificant. The play enjoyed huge success at the time but
has been neglected as regards revivals. In Johnson’s own production,
though, it stands revealed as every bit as enjoyable-yet-discomfiting
as the most mordant mid-period Alan Ayckbourn work.
He also has a doozy of a cast. Katherine Parkinson is one of Britain’s
finest purveyors of deadpan sarcasm. As the comedy dissident Ellie, she
drips corrosive, frustrated dissatisfaction from every pore, and the
one formal joke she tells is in such bad taste yet so perfectly
delivered that we blush for shame even as we hoot. Rufus Jones as her
husband, who takes Norman Wisdom more seriously than his marriage, is
almost as accomplished as Parkinson, although his long suit is a kind
of banal bombast. Ralf Little’s speciality is being amiably half a step
behind, and Emily Berrington simply needs to take herself a little too
seriously as the evening disintegrates around her, culminating in an
almost entirely unforced food fight complete with classic custard-pie
routines. Steve Pemberton is anything but a fifth wheel, beginning in
major-key camp then gradually delving deeper as the tension mounts.
Johnson orchestrates matters into an evening of exquisitely agonising,
embarrassing beauty. Thank heaven such a playwright and such a director
found each other, conveniently in the same body.
Written for the Financial
Times.