As a commercial prospect, you can’t fault this stage refit of the Dickensian Radio 4 comedy Bleak Expectations. Hit shows cannibalised from the broadcast media (see another recent Watermill theatre hit, Spike) bring fans along with them. Celebrity guest stars – Stephen Fry inevitably among them – are promised. Dickens himself remains an audience favourite. You might even point to the current zeal for deconstructing the Victorian age and its accomplishments, and the racist and colonial assumptions that underpinned them.
Actually, let’s not point to that. About the era’s sexism and sexlessness, Bleak Expectations jokes relentlessly. About more topical controversies, it has little to say, leaving undisturbed the jollity that results when you satirise only those 1800s foibles we all already agree on. It does this with considerable vim, as the cast of characters familiar from the airwaves reassemble.
Narrator Sir Philip Bin (played, tonight, by Sally Phillips) recounts the tale of his youth and young manhood, his father killed by penguins while on imperial business, his mother driven mad, his sister abducted by the scoundrel Gently Benevolent. Young Pip ends up at St Bastard’s boarding school (“Please sir, can I have some less”), before fleeing to London to make his fortune in the trash-can trade.
To borrow the show’s Blackadder-ish simile habit, it’s as cosy as a woollen teapot in a nest made of duvets. And the narrative momentum lags in Act Two, as Pip laboriously courts a young wife who promptly ups and dies. But it’s all achieved with brio in a production – by Caroline Leslie – spirited enough to get away with never taking itself remotely seriously. There are also, in Mark Evans’ script, lots of juicy one-liners, blunt anachronisms (“number 13, Total Tosspot Street”, indeed), and pleasingly ridiculous twists of melodrama (see: moustache-twiddling baddie using a kitten as an inkwell).
The cast, too, is terrific, particularly John Hopkins’ beastly Benevolent, Rachel Summers’ frustrated Ripely Fecund, marooned in the sister zone and Marc Pickering show-boating as the several Hardthrasher siblings and a three-man jury all at once. It’s that kind of show, with nothing new to say about our Victorian past (far less the present), and lots of funny ways of saying it.
• At the Criterion theatre, London, until 3 September
