By the end of the performance, a tang of pyrotechnics hangs in the air and the auditorium is hazy with smoke from the snaking lines of little flames that, only a moment ago, licked their way across the stage towards 36 barrels of gunpowder (plus one of home-brew, flavoured with “pig’s anus packed with burnt hair”). The Gunpowder Plot is, indeed, as the programme proclaims, an “explosive” subject for this comedy with “a Blackadder feel” (and a touch of Horrible Histories). The production itself, though, is something of a damp squib: a series of sketches rather than a fully developed comedy.
Writer David Reed is one of the three-strong team responsible for Radio 4’s The Penny Dreadfuls Present…, an occasional series of comic history plays. When director Gemma Fairlie heard their Guy Fawkes in 2009, she decided it would translate into “a great stage play”. Where radio’s scope is set by the imagination of its audience, though, theatre has to work within the limitations of reality. It’s not so much that, as the cliche has it, the pictures are better on radio, rather that they can be more rapidly shuffled. The same is true for changes in tone.
Here, comedy and tragedy clash. Fawkes’s motivating memories of the martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow (pregnant and pressed to death between stones) and of the carnage he experienced in Spanish battles feel out of place, slotted into the otherwise broad-stroke, comic-book style presentation of characters and situations. Similarly, suggestions of parallels with present-day terrorist acts come across as forced; they jar.
That said, the production has flashes of fun: Carla Goodman’s costumes and Eamonn O’Dwyer’s music, evoking the period with witty twists; also, committed physical performances from the five-strong cast, in particular Andrew Pollard’s melancholy Winter (with a bear costume and a tale to tell). Ultimately, though, the play, like the plotters’ powder kegs, never properly ignites.
At York Theatre Royal until 12 November
