THE COMEDY ABOUT A BANK ROBBERY
Three years ago, Mischief Theatre were a bunch of recentish graduates performing a comedy show above a pub in Islington. Now, that show – retitled The Play That Goes Wrong – has been running for 18 months in the West End, and has just been joined by The Comedy About A Bank Robbery. Both offerings do exactly what it says on the tin. The Play That Goes Wrong is a lovingly crafted example of the art of coarse acting (what the late theatre maverick Ken Campbell called ‘doing it crappily’). And The Comedy About A Bank Robbery uses the skills they’ve amassed to go all out for laffs from beginning to end.
That’s not actually as attractive a deal as it may sound. If you’ve resolved to let no more than three seconds go by between gags, you really have to try hard, and when you try that hard, it usually shows. They kick off with a stream of Airplane!-style puns (eg, ‘Neil!’ and everyone does), then it’s into a descendant of Abbott & Costello’s ‘Who’s on first’ routine... and already I was feeling that this kind of determination could prove seriously unfunny. Even when they work on straight-ahead farce, they’re in danger of overdoing things: the central scene contains not one, not two, but three contrived trousers-down, compromising-position moments.
But this is one of those shows that simply refuses not to let you dislike it. There are 31 different comedy flavours on offer, and you get a generous scoop of each one – verbal, physical, visual, classic, postmodern, the lot. The point at which I admitted defeat and started grinning like an eejit was a perspective-shift sequence in which we seem to be looking down on characters from overhead as actors are roped against the back wall; that’s when they start taking the mickey out of themselves by getting laughs out of how far they can or can’t move, and suddenly you know they know how ridiculous it all is.
What’s to say about the plot? It’s a comedy about a bank robbery, duh, set some time in the 1950s. Henry Shields is Mitch Ruscitti, the escaped con who masterminds (for certain values of ‘master’, or indeed ‘mind’) the robbery of the Minneapolis City Bank managed by burly, manic Henry Lewis as Robin Freeboys (‘Robbin’ three boys?’), and with Jonathan Sayer as put-upon sexagenarian intern Warren. By coincidence, they happen to be the three co-writers of both this and The Play That.... Basically, it’s a show that doesn’t merely go through funny and out the other side, but right round in curved space and back into funny again.
Until 2 October at the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly, London W1: 0844-815 6131, www.thecomedyaboutabankrobbery.com