Funny boys

Sir Ken’s excellent West End residency continues with a sugar-rich confection. Sean Foley has adapted and updated an elderly French farce about an assassin who befriends a needy depressive. Hitman Ralph rents a hotel suite overlooking a courtroom where his target is due to make an appearance. The neighbouring room is occupied by a mopey Welshman, Brian, who wants to hang himself from the light socket. Ralph discovers Brian’s plan and realises that Brian’s death will fill the hotel with cops and ruin his assassination attempt. So Ralph must save Brian from suicide. It’s a pretty clunky scenario and the logistics are frankly incredible because the design postulates two adjacent single rooms linked by a communicating door. Hotels aren’t built that way. But the show sidesteps these improbabilities by sheer force of character. It reaches a welcoming hand into the stalls and invites us all to come aboard for the ride.

Two brilliant and very different showmen lead the party. Rob Brydon has a wonderful line in careworn charm as the hyperactive Taffy unable to cope with an expired marriage. His ex-wife, now nesting with a brutish doctor, enters the action and Brian tries to win her back. We learn that sexual anxiety has driven him to attend a ‘premature ejaculation’ class. ‘And even then you left early,’ says his wife. Her new lover, the doctor, injects Ralph with a sedative that scrambles his brain and robs his speech of intelligibility. So the jet-setting killer is reduced to a stammering wreck urgently seeking an anti-dote to the toxin. Branagh, always game for a laugh it seems, gives an extraordinary display of fist-swinging, groin-clutching, semi-naked slapstick. Mark Hadfield offers superb support as a neurotic porter and he proves yet again that he’s one of the finest physical comedians in the business.