Barking in Essex: a hit with hen-night hysterics

How appropriate. Barking in Essex, a farce about gangsters, has been dishonestly billed as ‘a new comedy’. The script was written in 2005 by Clive Exton (1930–2007), who pre-dates Woody Allen by half a decade. The storyline — thieves quarrel over stolen loot — is a trusty antique featured in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

The plot moves fast. We open in a monstrously tacky mansion where a criminal matriarch, Emmie Packer, is in a flap. She’s just informed her son Darnley, and his wife, Chrissie, that she’s blown three million quid from a bank heist and the robber is on his way to claim the loot. Run for it! A pretty young lawyer, Allegra, arrives. Emmie concludes that she’s a grass and must die. She calls a hitman from across the road, and he agrees to bump Allegra off, no questions asked, 50 quid. The slaughter is amusingly botched and the survivors, plus hitman, escape abroad where they divide into two factions. Each conspires to betray the other. Murders follow. Little of this is credible and little of it is meant to be. (Fifty quid to kill a lawyer? Not even in Mogadishu.)

The Packers are unbelievably dim and their combined IQ hovers at around earth-worm level. They mispronounce ‘Allegra’ as ‘Algeria’, and they appear unaware that ‘Rio’ identifies a city. Yet they discuss Shakespeare at length. Chrissie, who has university qualifications, quotes a line or two of Hamlet, which prompts Emmie to offer this critical re-evaluation of the Bard’s achievement. ‘I hate Shakespeare: all that “thee and thou”, the cunt.’ The X-rated language, flowing from the venerable lips of Emmie, is a source of humour that the script relies on far too much.