Bleak Expectations
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 get