A sketch show that is just a bit ... sketchy
VETERAN playwright Michael Frayn’s wife is responsible for this production. She collected shavings from his workshop — scraps of writing, little ideas he’d had for plays and discarded — and secretly sent them to his publisher.
They have made a volume of 30 comic skits, the sort you might once have found in a revue show. Twenty of them are being staged in the round at the Hampstead.
The enterprise is not entirely successful. Some of the sketches are weak. However, about five of them are well worth staging and two alone are worth the price of the ticket.
One of these classics is a sketch in which a doleful brass player in an orchestra pit mulls on his lot. He plays the E-flat contraphonium and is fated to count hundreds of bars of inaction before his short burst of monotonous parps.
His life boils with anxiety and resentment for his orchestra colleagues. Brilliant — and I suspect all too truthful.
The other cracker is a sketch in which two marble statues on a medieval church tomb — a knight and his lady — come to life and grumble about the sound of pop music in the crypt; it has disturbed their sleep. Is it the new vicar’s service for teenagers?
Or is it a trendy evensong? The knight gets terrible cramp in one of his legs and has to hop around the tomb. ‘Everyone thinks we’re the perfect couple,’ growls his wife.
Revues may remind us of Morecambe & Wise or Sixties television with the likes of John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and David Frost. Or perhaps of our university days, if we had them: when I was at college, we were always doing revues.
POPULAR subject matter tended to be medical complaints, telephone conversations, couples in restaurants, spoof news bulletins and Shakespeare rip-offs.
Sure enough, all feature in this Frayn collection.
Hamish McColl’s production even has that constant of college revues, a dicey set — here a central platform which more than once seemed to get stuck on opening night. It did not really matter.
Revues never take themselves too seriously and, though they can be artistically unsatisfying (no sketch lasting more than a few minutes), it is all reasonably good fun.
A skit about two mathematicians gossiping over the office water- cooler — in a duly mathematical way — is clever and so, despite the hoary feel, is the news despatch from the gates of Elsinore, a reporter telling us of the Danish royal family’s tensions.
Were one to be looking for an artistic theme in the collection, it is probably humans’ genius for failing to communicate (be it in marriage or over airport Tannoys).
The cast of Esther Coles, Tim Downie, Chris larner, Felicity Montagu, Nina Wadia and comic maestro Mark Hadfield make the most of the material.
I had a good view of Mr Frayn in the stalls and could see that he was chuckling happily throughout.
How lovely to retain that freshness and delight.