With his painted face and demonic demeanour, Joe Kent-Walters’ alter ego Frankie Monroe has been compared to the League of Gentlemen’s Papa Lazarou. It’s Lazarus he more resembles in this follow-up to last year’s debut, which won Kent-Walters a best newcomer award. In Live!!!, the monstrous MC of a Rotherham working men’s club was dragged to hell after the expiry of his pact with Satan. In Dead!!!, he rises again, after a stint as entertainment officer in the underworld, to reclaim his club from a scarier foe than the devil himself: gentrification.
That’s the premise for a show that doubles down on, rather than develops, the formula that hit paydirt for the Huddersfield man last summer. And why not? Kent-Walters has devised something outrageously funny and bizarre here, a charismatic ghoul of an alter ego, terrorising his audience with a series of crap cabaret acts, delivered in a voice as deep and gravelly as a quarry in the bowels of hell. He appears in fewer guises this time, but his tatty ventriloquist’s doll, Mucky Little Pup, returns, and Kent-Walters swaps jackets to star as the usurper of Frankie’s club, Vegas Dave, too.
