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Following the enormo-smash that was ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’, West End producers seem obsessed with the idea that the works of playwright Richard Bean are 24-carat box office gold, despite some evidence to the contrary. The messy ‘Great Britain’ was a modest success at best; the excellent ‘Made in Dagenham’ was an undeserved flop. And now his fourth West End show is a revival for 2002’s not-especially-commercial ‘The Mentalists’.
You can in fact see why it’s been staged: a minimalist two-hander that can be put on cheaply over the slower summer months, ’The Mentalists’ also has extremely funny dialogue that betrays Bean’s former life as a stand-up comedian. And its star is Stephen Merchant, a stand-up comedian making his stage debut.
Ted (Merchant) and Morrie (Steffan Rhodri) are two best friends who’ve shacked up in a cheap hotel. Ted is a boorish but apparently harmless Daily Mail reader who rants incessantly and negatively about more or less everything, from foreigners to the quality of the hotel door. Morrie is a camp hairdresser with an arsenal of well-worn anecdotes, mostly about the prodigious number of ladies he has allegedly made it with. As they bicker on, it becomes apparent that Ted wants to set up some sort of utopian cult; as they bicker further, we start to question both Ted’s harmlessness and his sanity.
There is much that is good about Abbey Wright’s production, not least that it’s very funny. But Bean’s intimate, Pinteresque play resists its inexperienced star and director’s attempts to turn it into a big West End comedy.
In many ways it’s a sweet portrait of two friends who may or may not be psychopaths, and it should surely come across more tender and more troubling than Wright’s production allows. Rhodri is extremely well cast: funny, odd, charismatic – he keeps you guessing beyond the final curtain what the truth is about Morrie. And Merchant… well, he smacks into Bean’s gags like a prize fighter, but he delivers them like Stephen Merchant doing stand-up, or Stephen Merchant playing a Stephen Merchant-alike character in a sitcom. That’s not a totally bad thing, because his style of comedy is so naturalistic. But the subtleties and singularities of Ted feel obscured till the very end, when Merchant does tap into a childlike charm that makes some sense of the character. But it feels a bit late to really make sense of the play.