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Mark Evans’s goofy send-up of the more picaresque elements of Victoriana – think sword fights with baguettes, swooning damsels, a man with a big moustache playing three identical brothers and a sister – recounts the adventures of Pip Bin, the man who invented the bin.
Caroline Leslie’s zippy stage version of ‘Bleak Expectations’ ran at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury last year, but there’s a big difference now it’s in London: celebrity guest narrators each take to the stage for a week with script in hand. On press night it’s the always brilliant Sally Phillips, but you can choose from Sue Perkins, Stephen Fry, Tom Allen and many more.
Phillips (or whoever you end up with) plays the older Pip, a writer who is ‘better by far than that hack Charles Dickens’. He tells the story of his life from birth, via the penguin-related death of his father, the dastardly doings of his guardian Gently Benevolent and his ill-fated romances with women like Flora Dies-Early.
Yeah, subtlety is not really the point. What worked in short blasts on Radio 4 gets pretty wearying in a two-and-a-half-hour chunk. While Evans sort of sends up the kind of guffawing absurdist humour that used to be British mainstream comedy – Goons, Footlights etc – it also is that humour too. Strong whiffs of ‘Blackadder’ and ‘Python’ are in the air (the horrible boarding school Pip is sent to is called St Bastard’s).
Part of the problem is it gives off this constant sense of trying to be funny rather than being funny. It gets interesting when Phillips comes on with a nervous and slightly mischievous glint in her eye. She’s much less sure-footed than the rest of the cast and has to glance at her script constantly. It actually feels like something exciting might happen. She’s brilliant in a couple of unscripted moments, and nervously corpses at one point. But that spontaneity actually just shows up how safe the rest of it is, and how repetitive.
That’s no slight on a cast who embrace the gurning maximalism very gamely, particularly a spectacular Marc Pickering who takes things to another level as the four horrible Hardthrasher siblings, with popping eyes and a series of silly hats and wigs, wringing his lines for everything they’re worth. He finds an extra level of madness in the script which brings it alive.
There’s a nice Dickensian set with portraits and books by Katie Lias, as well as brilliantly stupid sound effects in Ella Wahlström’s design. And to Evans’s credit, when the relentlessly similar jokes get a bit too much, he tosses in something unexpectedly hilarious like the evil Benevolent using a kitten as an inkwell and writing with its blood. It’s hard not to laugh at just how macabre the image is.
Elsewhere in the West End you’ve got ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ and ‘Operation Mincemeat’. There’s a lot of crossover between the three: absurd humour, slapstick, parody. But where those two can make you spit out your interval ice cream, ‘Bleak Expectations’ is one to titter at. Not the best of times, nor the worst, but somewhere pleasantly in the middle.