Forgettable stuff: The Crown Jewels, at the Garrick, reviewed

In the 1990s, the BBC had a popular flat-share comedy, Men Behaving Badly, about a pair of giggling bachelors who were scolded and dominated by their mummy-substitute girl-friends. The author, Simon Nye, has written a historical crime caper about the theft of the crown jewels in 1671, as Charles II prepared to celebrate his tenth year on the throne.

The psychological co-ordinates of the play are poorly handled. The thief, Colonel Blood, is an irritating Irish crosspatch who wants to drive the hated English from his homeland. Charles (played by Al Murray) is more attractive, a fun-loving gadabout who enjoys sex, jokes and science and who can’t bear Puritans. So the audience sides with the King and hopes that Blood’s vindictive scheme will fail.

This is a serious mistake to make at the start of a crime comedy: the audience should be rooting for the criminals. Blood dresses up as a parson and asks to inspect the jewels, which are kept in a locked room guarded by an incompetent old soldier (also played by Al Murray). The robbery ought to be simple but the crooks are even stupider than the bumbling guard whom they stab and beat with a mallet. The heist fails, the thieves are discovered and all are sentenced to death. The story delivers a couple more twists and then the curtain falls.

There’s barely enough material here for a sketch show let alone a full-length play and the script is padded out with meandering scenes and underdeveloped characters. Blood’s gang includes a hysterical actress who loves showing off and improvising absurdly melodramatic scenes for no reason. It’s a brilliant comic idea to embed such an unreliable character within a group of thieves who are engaged in a complex and dangerous crime but the opportunity counts for nothing.