How not to ape a Hollywood classic
King Kong (A Comedy) Waterloo Vaults
King Kong as Donkey Kong? It’s not a bad idea given the logistical challenges of producing a plausible alternative to Hollywood’s favourite monster on a tiny stage with, I’m guessing, minimal budget. So, in this strenuously zany 80-minute take on Merian C Cooper’s 1933 classic, the chase through Skull Island takes the form of the iconic computer game played out by tiny stick puppets. It’s a neat send-up of moviemaking bombast – and in this rough and ready comedy, a rare example of wit.
This piece – the sort of after-hours caper that would look much more at home on the Edinburgh Fringe – comes from Daniel Clarkson, one half of the team behind the Olivier Award-nominated Potted Potter, which served up all seven Harry Potter novels in a madcap 70 minutes. Highly condensed forms of classic stories are hardly a new idea, yet while some shows make a comic virtue of delivering, say, Ben-hur with a cast of four, Clarkson’s parody, directed by Owen Lewis, is a spoof in search of a concept. It’s got boisterous energy, committed performances, imaginative use of puppetry and visual gags aplenty, but there is precious little here you won’t have seen before. Including, of course, the story. Movie mogul Carl Denham (here styled as an ego in a panama given to selfmythologising, film-noir-style voice-overs) has embarked on a semi-deranged voyage to make a film about the legendary beast on Skull Island, with Hollywood’s version of the sacrificial victim, a young innocent blonde, in tow. Except Alix Dunmore’s Ann is no simpering, big-eyed Fay Wray but a smart cookie with a degree in cartography from Columbia, while her alpha male lover Jack is an incompetent dweeb who’d run away from a banana skin, let alone a gorilla. The default hero of the piece, meanwhile, is Token Guy – a random character entirely irrelevant to the plot and who, thanks to the tireless Brendan Murphy, is unquestionably the funniest thing in the show.
Clarkson and Lewis know their way around the Airplane! movie and a similar pun-happy comic vein throbs throughout here. The tribe on Skull Island are hapless Lancashire chaps and there’s a good gag about the theme tune from Titanic. Everyone, particularly Murphy who plays multiple roles, is working very hard. But Clarkson has nothing new to say about the original film and, apart from a couple of dead obvious quips about Trump, nothing at all to say about how this most symbolist of Hollywood narratives plays out in contemporary America. Fun as far as it goes but to be frank, that’s really not very far.