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As you’d hope from a comedy written by two-fifths of the Young Ones, Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer’s ‘It’s Headed Straight Towards Us’ is pretty amusing.
It is, however, soufflé light, a trifle of a play that would blow away if you breathed on it were it not for fine, committed performances from Rufus Hound and Samuel West as a pair of fractious middle-aged thesps, and youngster Nenda Neururer as the unfortunate runner who has to look after them.
The setting is the wilds of Iceland, where filming is underway for the sixth entry in a fantasy film series called ‘Vulcan’. Uptight Hugh (West) is a reasonably successful British character actor who has his own spacious trailer thanks to his long-running role as the title character’s butler. However, his trailer has been crashed by former friend Gary Savage (Hound), a washed-up bad boy who has managed to secure a one-line part as a monster in the film, but nonetheless feels he deserves the trailer more than Hugh. Compounding their woes, Mother Nature has it in for them: they face heavy snowfall, collapsed bridges, shifting glaciers and worse.
It’s a comedy about bickering and egos, that sets up a pleasing clash between Hugh – essentially a careerist who acts but doesn’t love acting – with Gary, who has sabotaged his early success via drunken hijinks but is still driven by a primal need to act. Leela (Neururer), meanwhile, is the unfortunate young wrangler who suddenly takes on a role of more significance to both men when a secret about her past is revealed.
While both West and Hound offer committed performances that deftly conjure a sense of history and regret – not to mention the sheer weirdness of acting as a lifelong vocation – Edmondson and Planer’s writing just doesn’t really feel deep enough to match the bittersweet nature of the performances or Rachel Kavanaugh’s production.
I’m not saying there’s no more to them than the knockabout surrealism of a sitcom they made 40 years ago. But that’s a form of comedy they clearly nailed. Despite Hound’s silly monster outfit, ‘It’s Headed Straight Towards Us’ isn’t a broad comedy, and requires a more contemplative tone that seems outside the writers’ range. The play comes in at a very breezy one hour and 50 minutes including interval, and feels like it would have gained from another half hour probing further into Gary and Hugh’s heads.
A pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s really just a trifle when it could have been much more.