Three years ago, Mischief Theatre were a
bunch of recentish graduates performing a comedy show above a pub in
Islington. Now, that show – retitled
The
Play That Goes Wrong – has been running for 18 months in the
West End, and has just been joined by
The
Comedy About A Bank Robbery.
Both offerings do exactly what it says on the tin.
The Play That Goes Wrong is a
lovingly crafted example of the art of coarse acting (what the late
theatre maverick Ken Campbell called “doing it crappily”). And
The Comedy About A Bank Robbery
uses the skills they’ve amassed to go all-out for yoks from beginning
to end.
That’s not actually as attractive a deal as it may sound. If you’re
resolved to let no more than three seconds go by between gags, you
really have to try hard, and when you try that hard, it usually shows.
They kick off with a stream of
Airplane!-style
puns (e.g. “Neil!” and everyone does), then it’s into a descendant of
Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on first” routine... and already I was
feeling that this kind of determination could prove seriously unfunny.
Even when they work on straight-ahead farce, they’re in danger of
overdoing things: the central scene contains not one, not two, but
three contrived trousers-down compromising-position moments.
But this is one of those shows that simply refuse to let you not like
them. There are 31 different comedy flavours on offer, and you get a
generous scoop of each one – verbal, physical, visual, classic,
postmodern, the lot. The point at which I admitted defeat and started
grinning like an eejit was a perspective-shift sequence in which we
seem to be looking down on characters from overhead as actors are roped
against the back wall; that’s when they start taking the mickey out of
themselves by getting laughs out of how far they can or can’t move, and
suddenly you know they know just how ridiculous it all is.
What’s to say about the plot? It’s a comedy about a bank robbery,
duh, set some time in the Fifties. Henry Shields is Mitch Ruscitti, the
escaped con who masterminds (for certain values of “master”, or indeed
“mind”) the robbery of the Minneapolis City Bank managed by burly,
manic Henry Lewis as Robin Freeboys (“Robbin’ three boys?”), and with
Jonathan Sayer as put-upon sexagenarian intern Warren. By coincidence,
they happen to be the three co-writers of both this and
The Play That.... Basically, it’s a
show that doesn’t merely go through funny and out the other side, but
right round in curved space and back into funny again.
Written for The Lady.