Devilish!

in a tiny, 60-seat fringe theatre, an angel falls to earth. The clever set of ‘Devilish!’ resembles a graphic novel, with its bold Marvelesque colours; it’s just a shame that it’s also the most comic thing about BB Cooper and Chris Burgess’s new show. 

It’s billed as a ‘musical comedy’ and there are definitely songs (if instantly forgettable ones). But there are few laughs, and almost all come courtesy of the excellent Louie Westwood, who plays both a magician who has fallen on hard times and a TV host. With his scene-stealing accents and wonderfully expressive face, he’s always on and outshines the rest of the cast. 

Angel, the heavenly protagonist who crash-lands in Clapham, is necessarily innocent, but it borders on annoying that he is quite so idiotically naive and puppyish. His love interest Ruth is just plain dull and her colleague/best friend/supposed-to-be comic-relief sidekick Maddie seems to have been given ‘Northern’ as a character steer, and not much else. Ruth’s story arc – wants fame, gets fame, will-she-won’t-she go under the knife to keep fame, finds love, is happy – mimics Angel’s, except that he is doing it because he wants to be human and to feel everything that humans feel. Which, if he were watching Marc Urquhart’s production, would be ‘a bit bored’. 

As Angel’s wings slowly disintegrate until there’s scarcely an ostrich feather left on the poor man, the production gets a bit sillier and it’s all the better for it: finally losing any pretence of being vaguely serious. There’s so much potential for ‘Devilish!’ to be a brilliantly camp show, but it always feels as though something is being held back. More glitter, please!