Comedy

An affectionate exercise in comic sabotage: Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) reviewed

Let’s be honest. Jane Austen is popular because War and Peace doesn’t fit inside a handbag. Austen’s best-loved novel, Pride and Prejudice, has been updated in a fetching new production that treats the sacred text as a screwball comedy. The fun starts before curtain-up with the cast of five girls messing about on stage and struggling with a chandelier that almost shatters but doesn’t. This improv bit is irritatingly predictable. Then the show begins and the girls start to curse, laugh and pontificate their way through the tale. We get a feminist lecture explaining that Mrs Bennet’s predicament owes itself to the laws of bequest that prevented women from inheriting

The unseen Victoria Wood

For a few years now I have been living with Victoria Wood. That sounds all wrong, obviously, and yet no more apt phrase suggests itself. Not long after her death I was invited to write her authorised biography, and in due course a vast collection of documents was delivered to my address. Packed into storage boxes, which I stacked in corners and stuffed under beds, her intellectual legacy became a physical fact. It was in sifting through this remarkable archive that I started to come across work — masses of it — that had never seen the light of day. At its core was a stash of 100 television sketches.

This is how G&S should be staged: ENO’s HMS Pinafore reviewed

Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had broken America too; at one point there were eight competing productions on Broadway alone. The single most wrongheaded notion that still clings to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas is that they’re somehow low-rent or parochial. They were blockbuster international hits, superbly written, lavishly staged and exported far beyond the Anglosphere. Pinafore was performed in Denmark as Frigate Jutland and in Vienna, Johann Strauss was driven off stage by the runaway success of The Mikado. In the words of the operetta historian Richard Traubner, Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaborations were ‘simply the best

A highly polished exercise in treading water: Season 3 of Succession reviewed

At one point in an early Simpsons, Homer comes across an old issue of TV Guide, and finds the listing for the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. ‘Gomer upsets Sergeant Carter,’ he reads — adding with a fond chuckle, ‘I’ll never forget that episode.’ Even for British viewers unfamiliar with the show, the joke is clear: that’s what happens in every episode. Sad to say, this popped into my head while watching the first in the new series of Succession. The acting, script and direction are as brilliant as ever. Nonetheless, once Logan Roy began yet again to dangle the possibility of becoming the next CEO of his media empire before

Lionel Shriver

My advice to Dave Chappelle

I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights that abruptly run out. But this time, I rushed to see Dave Chappelle’s new stand-up special The Closer lest Netflix’s own disgruntled employees succeed in getting the performance taken down. Strictly speaking, the affronted staff aren’t demanding the show’s withdrawal, but it’s hard to see what else the proposed employee walkout on Wednesday was designed to accomplish. After all, in the olden days if you didn’t like something on television you just didn’t watch it, but in our enlightened times you make damned sure no one else can watch it

Dave Chappelle’s show is a rip-off

Towards what seemed like the halfway point of his show in London last night, Dave Chappelle announced to the crowd he was going to tell us something he was refusing to tell the media.  He wanted us to know, he said while looking sadly at the floor, that his quarrel was not with the gay or the trans communities . No, no. Looking up and raising an index finger, he explained: ‘I’m fighting a corporate agenda that needs to be addressed.’ Thinking we still had another hour of the show to go, we cheered. ‘You fight those corporate vampires, Dave!’ we thought. He then let us know, whenever it was possible,

Jennifer Saunders is brilliant: Blithe Spirit at the Harold Pinter Theatre reviewed

Blithe Spirit is a comedy with the plot of a horror story. Charles, a middle-aged novelist, lives happily with his second wife, Ruth, but he accidentally conjures up the spirit of his first wife, Elvira, during a séance. He becomes the target of a ghostly murder plot. Elvira decides to bump Charles off and enjoy his company in the afterlife. The play was one of Noël Coward’s biggest hits and although the script is 80 years old, this production features intriguing new material. The spiritualist, Madame Arcati, suffers from wind. She refers to her dietary anxieties several times and she mentions her dislike of red meat and roast pigeon. Jennifer

Somewhere between eye-opening and jaw-dropping: Sky’s Hawking – Can You Hear Me? reviewed

It is, of course, not unknown for a man to become famous with the support of his family — and, once he has, to prefer global adulation to being with them, before leaving his wife for a younger woman. What’s rather less common is when the man in question is almost completely paralysed. This was the story told by Hawking: Can You Hear Me? and, in advance, it might have sounded an over-familiar one. After all, not only was Stephen Hawking one of the few physicists to become a tabloid staple, but he was also played to Oscar-winning effect by Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. As it transpired,

Sexist, classist and pro-global warming: Frozen, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

Frozen the musical declares war on woke politics. The 2013 Disney movie has been turned into a song-and-dance show that openly celebrates sexism, classism and misogyny. Plus, it salutes the joys of global warming. It’s set in a Scandinavian realm ruled by a kindly monarch who lives in a castle attended by fawning servants. No sign of social mobility here. An impetuous young princess, Anna, falls in love with an eligible duke, Hans, but their betrothal annoys Anna’s sister, Princess Elsa. This is dangerous because Elsa has magical powers that she can’t control. She accidentally casts a spell on Anna, who falls to the ground with a terrible illness. Things

The political power of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown

There is a rather sweet moment in the middle of each Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show where, after some magnificently obscene one-liner, he addresses the howling audience. ‘I love you people,’ he says. ‘Just like me, you’re rough.’ The audience laughs and applauds at this observation of itself. The wall is broken and the performer and audience are as one. This is ‘rough’ used primarily in its north-east of England context, meaning not so much violent or abrasive (although both are also possible), but cheap and low-down and a little bit ugly. Roy’s now 76 and has been knocking them dead for 40 years, packed houses wherever he goes. But you

How we killed comedy theatre: Nigel Planer interviewed

Nigel Planer is on a mission to bring farce back to the West End. ‘There’s a lot of snobbery in comedy,’ he tells me when we meet at a hotel bar near the Old Vic. ‘People say, “Oh that’s comedy. It can’t have any meaning”.’ The actor and writer is still best known for playing Neil the hippie in the 1980s sitcom The Young Ones and he can recall a time when farce was a staple of London theatre. ‘I remember going along and really enjoying myself, you know, a nice big cast, actors falling over, characters treating someone differently because they think it’s someone else. All that stuff simply

Returning to stand-up is no laughing matter

In a recent preview of this year’s diet Edinburgh Fringe a local reporter wondered aloud why so many stand-ups were doing shows as a work in progress. I, along with numerous comics, let him have it, self-righteously pointing out that most of our gigs since March 2020 have been staring at a Macbook. Or outdoors shouting punchlines to someone ten metres away asleep on a deckchair. It takes a while to get your confidence back when you have flashbacks of gigging downstairs in your house to a webcam with a make-shift mic-stand and knock-off lighting. A low point came when a neighbour walked past my window and momentarily locked eyes

Sinatra, Bacon and a YouTube star: Edinburgh Fringe Festival round-up

Sinatra: Raw (Pleasance, until 15 August) takes us inside the mind of the 20th century’s greatest crooner. The performer, Richard Shelton, catches Sinatra in confessional mode in the 1970s as he looks back on his chequered career. In the early days, a promoter suggested the stage name ‘Frankie Satin’ but his tough-minded mother, Dolly, vetoed the idea. The show’s best sections investigate the harrowing details of his tangled and doomed romance with Ava Gardener. Fame and wealth never sweetened Sinatra’s prickly character. ‘Drink is my worst enemy,’ he quips, necking whisky from a tumbler. ‘But, like the Bible says, you’ve got to love your enemies.’ This show packs a surprising

Why do I find sketch shows – even the better ones – so embarrassing and charmless?

On sketch shows, the wisdom once was that you needed a punchline. That is, a slightly hammy, summative sign-off to let people know that they had come to the end of any given bit, to help the audience keep its bearings. The rules changed when the team behind Monty Python, who hated writing that mugging final joke, discovered that you could simply cut to Graham Chapman wearing a dress in a field and saying in a stern voice: ‘And now for something completely different’ — and it turned out that this was not only just as good, it was actually quite a lot better. This is the problem with sketch

Quietly devastating: Nowhere Special reviewed

Off the Rails is one of those gentle ensemble comedies that we do so well (Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc.), except when we don’t, and it all falls rather flat, and feels like the B-side of a Richard Curtis film. This comes in, alas, at the flatter, B-side end of the spectrum, even if its heart is in the right place and all the other things you say when a film doesn’t deserve a kicking. But you can’t really say it’s any good. Plot-wise the deal is: to comply with the dying wish of their best friend, Liz (Sally Phillips), Kate (Jenny Seagrove) and Cassie (Kelly Preston) must

Lloyd Evans

What a comic treat: The Game of Love and Chance at the Arcola reviewed

Lady Sylvia is a gorgeous aristocrat whose hand is sought by the charming Dorante whom she has never met. To avoid the stiff formalities of courtship, Lady Sylvia swaps places with her maid and observes Dorante from the safety of pretended servitude. But instead of falling for Dorante, she becomes enamoured of his manservant. However, there’s another wrinkle coming in Marivaux’s classic comedy. Deronte’s manservant, unbeknown to Lady Sylvia, is actually Dorante himself, who has pulled an identical switcheroo with his valet. The story is so hopelessly contrived that its sheer artificiality becomes part of the joke. This production of The Game of Love and Chance, directed by Jack Gamble,

Is Jed Mercurio bored with Line of Duty?

When a drama begins with news of a ‘Chis handler’ receiving ‘intel graded A1 on the matrix’ that causes a ‘conflab with the SFC’, it can mean only one thing: you’re watching a new series of Line of Duty. And just to confirm it, shortly afterwards a bunch of armed police carried out a raid that didn’t go to plan — possibly because it was being led by a bent copper. As ever, too, there’s a big name playing the potential wrong ’un, with Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, No Country for Old Men) guest-starring as DCI Jo Davidson, leader of the Murder Investigation Team. More unexpectedly, Jo’s underlings include Kate Fleming

No, Nish Kumar’s Mash Report hasn’t been ‘cancelled’

It’s not been a good year for any of us. But it certainly hasn’t been a good year for Nish Kumar, alleged comedian and voice of perma-smug Britain. Last year, sensing a gap in the market for anti-Trump material, Kumar tried to break America with a topical Daily Show-style show hosted on some weird new streaming service called Quibi, only for it to shut down six months later. Now The Mash Report, the primetime BBC Two Daily Show-style topical show he fronted four four series, has been axed. Even among the politically monochrome BBC comedy stable, The Mash Report broke new ground for liberal sanctimony and woke hectoring. It was

The rise of the super pessimist

Covid isn’t the only thing to have developed a dangerous strain in the UK; pessimism has also mutated and is on the rise. BBC news recently reported in horrified tones that the economy had contracted 2.6 per cent in November, barely mentioning the fact that this was largely down to the nation being in lockdown. I don’t know what our national broadcaster has up its sleeve next but I’m expecting a dambing connection between home schooling and black market valium. That kind of contraction during lockdown is actually something to be proud of. The resilience of British consumerism during this last year has been this generation’s Dunkirk. Instead of hopping in tiny boats we’re

Actors will be in trouble if the Bridge Theatre’s latest experiment catches on

Flight has been hailed as a new form of dramatic presentation — prefab theatre. It’s great to look at. A set of model boxes containing stick figures and colourful landscapes slides past the seated viewer while a voiceover reads the narrative. No thesps are required, which may be a relief to producers and directors but the acting profession will be in trouble if this experiment catches on. The story, adapted from Hinterland by Caroline Brothers, follows two Afghan teenagers, Kabir and Aryan, who decide to walk to Europe in search of a better life. All they have is $2,000 in cash and a spare pair of trainers each. Along the