Eighteen months ago,
The Play That Goes Wrong completed
its ascent from post-student fringe show to West End hit. It is still
running, and is now joined – at the former home of the spoof version of
The 39 Steps which had been
one of the company’s inspirations – by... well, you can’t accuse
Mischief Theatre of titling their offerings misleadingly. Just as
The Play That... is a deliberate
example of the art of coarse acting (what the late theatre maverick Ken
Campbell called “doing it crappily”), so
The Comedy About... utilises all
the skills honed for the earlier show in a slightly more conventional
context: virtually all the chaos is in the tale itself rather than the
performance.
And by gum, they take their comedy seriously. It’s a rare occasion when
three seconds pass without a gag of some description. However, this
isn’t an unambiguous plus point. A few minutes after the opening
fusillade of
Airplane!-style
punning literalisms (e.g. “Neil!”, and everybody does), during a
protracted cousin of the old “who’s on first” routine, I began to feel
that the company were trying much too hard. The central scene, which is
pure farce, contains not one but three compromising-position moments,
which is surely overdoing things. And yet, after the interval, during a
perspective-shift sequence in which we seem to be looking down on
characters from overhead as actors are roped against the back wall, I
finally had to concede that this is a show that does not merely go
through funny and out the other side, but right round in curved space
and back into funny again.
It’s the range of comic ideas that is so undeniably impressive: verbal,
physical, visual, and ranging from classical to postmodern in style.
Proceedings, set in the 1950s, are led by the three co-writers: Henry
Shields is Mitch Ruscitti, the escaped con who masterminds (ahem) 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. Charlie Russell also
excels as Caprice, Freeboys’ gold-digging daughter with a heart. It all
adds up to one of those cheerfully defiant shows that refuse to let you
not like them.
Written for the Financial
Times.