In this painfully silly celebration of great British theatre – including the works of those notable Brits Chekhov and Tennessee Williams – Ciaran Murtagh and Andrew Jones play rep hams Chester Blenheim (‘Moustache of theYear 1984’) and Hugh ‘Huge’ Carpenter. The pair once performed together in a touring production of ‘Pygmalion’, the one taking the role of the pig, the other of the alien. If that joke (one of the evening’s best) strikes you as irresistibly hilarious, rush to get tickets.
It might have been more fun if the relationship between Chesty and Huge were more developed. Instead we get a series of uninspired, slipshod parodies.There’s a Holmes and Watson spoof, a bit of inelegant prancing about in feline costumes to evoke ‘Memory’ from Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’, and a climactic (nudge-nudge, wink-wink, these guys really know how to milk innuendo) 15-minute condensation of ‘King Lear’. The problem with much of the humour is that it doesn’t appear to grow out of an affection for the theatre or the actor’s life – just the opposite actually. So Keira Knightley is ‘shit’, Shakespeare is just ‘so fucking funny’ (intoned with heavy irony) and Alan ‘Gordon’ Bennett is dismissed as ‘one of Britain’s most boring playwrights’. Huge attempts a parody called ‘Talking Faeces’, which might be funny if the monologues were really called ‘Taking Faces’ – but they’re not, and parody needs to be much more precise to hit home. Even Brecht deserves better than this.
