A cast of celebs fails to bring any oomph to The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers is back. Sean Foley’s adaptation of the classic Ealing comedy introduces us to a crew of villains who stage a train heist while lodging in the house of a sweet old lady. She discovers their crime and when they try to bump her off she proves indestructible. The 1955 movie makes a huge effort to manage the plot’s credibility. The audience is never quite sure if this is a criminal gang in a comic predicament or comic gang in a criminal one. Sean Foley abjures such nuances and gives us a bunch of clowns in a two-hour slapstick routine. This approach deprives the tale of all its subtlety and shadowy strangeness. Michael Taylor’s complex, expressionist design adds to the sense of artifice.

A cast of celebs compete to get the most laughs. The lead is played by John Gordon Sinclair, whose charm is a tad perfunctory (but at least his English accent is beginning to sound slightly English). Simon Day is pleasantly silly playing a corrupt army officer. Ralf Little bats his eyelids winsomely as a lanky young teddyboy, while Con O’Neill stomps and rages as the token Mafioso but his anger seems downright weird rather than funny. Chris McCalphy plays a violent bruiser as if he were understudying Bungle from Rainbow. Only Angela Thorne, as the old lady, has the sense to perform it as a straight drama and she reaches for emotion rather than giggles.

A lengthy tour has taken much of the oomph and freshness from this show. Tired mannerisms are creeping in all over the place. And the curtain call, which I imagine the actors devised for themselves, is like a playlet in its own right with the performers taking turns to emerge from behind bits of furniture and handing each other flowers before forming up for a group photograph.