“You cunt!” – the opening line, from
offstage, signals that Clive Exton’s comedy will not mince its words.
Exton uses expletives with deliberation, but not always with the
intended effect. (Compare the magnificently profane rhetoric of the TV
series
Deadwood.) For every
turn of phrase that is spiced up or given added rhythmical zest by its
Anglo-Saxon embellishment, there are two or three that simply pin the
characters as having mouths as wide as the Thames estuary and minds as
narrow as the creek at Canvey Island.
The Packers are an East End-diaspora criminal family, living high on
the hog (Simon Higlett’s eye-achingly vulgar “luxury” set drew applause
in its own right on press night) off the proceeds of younger son
Algie’s safe deposit robbery several years ago. Now that Algie is
getting out of prison, they realise they need either to tell him and
his posh fiancée that they’ve been dipping into his capital or make
alternative arrangements sharpish. They choose the latter course,
leaving a dead body and a bullet lodged inside cut-price hitman Rocco
Dimaggio (who’s as Italian as Pizza Hut) and fleeing with Rocco to a
second-act location which looks like a tumbledown hovel on the Costa
del Crime but turns out to be rather less exotic. Mum Emmie, elder son
Darnley, daughter-in-law Chrissie and Rocco hatch various plots to
return home, blatantly spurning the idea that the only way is ethics,
and you just know that one or more of them will not be seeing the final
curtain from a vertical position.
There must be a reason why it took eight years for this play to be
staged (Exton himself died in 2007): I incline to the view that this is
because it isn’t much good. There must, similarly, be a reason why it
is now being presented: that, I
think, is because the likes of TV series
The Only Way Is Essex have blurred
the lines between indictment and endorsement of these values so that a
production like Harry Burton’s here can now both have its cake, by
satirising such brainless excess, and eat it, by ensuring the satire is
so toothless that the whole affair becomes simply a bit of raucous fun.
Supposedly. Sheila Hancock, Lee Evans and Keeley Hawes are the leads
whose CVs will not be ornamented by the inclusion of this particular
venture.
Written for the Financial
Times.