Amphibious assault

David Spicer’s farce Raising Martha opens with a skeleton being disinterred on a frog farm by animal-rights activists. They hope to force the frog farmer, an ageing dope fiend, to set his amphibious livestock free. Got all that? It’s complicated. And there’s more. The skeleton turns out to be the long-dead mother of the farmer, who alerts his shifty brother and calls in the cops as well. A loquacious twerp, Inspector Clout, arrives to investigate and the tangled narrative starts to unfold.

This is an uneven play but the good bits are excellent. Stephen Boxer is amusingly deranged as the hallucinating frog man. The animal-rights activists are wittily portrayed as misanthropic nuisances. Clout, the cop who can’t stop nattering, is the least original and least successful character. He sounds like a dated platitude (calling everyone ‘sir’) and his visual stylings belong to the 1950s: trench coat, trilby, moustache. Spicer likes to tinker with the mechanics of his storyline, which causes needless duplications. Does the farmer cultivate frogs or marijuana? Both. Are the militant veggies plotting against the farmer or against each other? Again, both. The whereabouts of mum’s skeleton becomes a little tiresome to follow and the imaginary six-foot amphibians stalking the farmer are less hilarious than they might be.

Clarifying these bumps and wrinkles would make the show cleaner and its flight smoother. And though Spicer is full of mirth, and he’s gloriously alive to the absurdities of language, he’s missing a quality regarded by some as crucial. He’s not angry. A great farce usually has an element of moral retribution with an overmighty wrongdoer being forced to endure exposure and humiliation. (This, incidentally, is why Trump is immune to satire: his private solecisms are already public knowledge.)