Imagine the weakest episode of Blackadder crossed with Horrible Histories on an off-day and a woefully under-rehearsed panto. Now you have a rough idea of this shabby comedy, written by Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye and starring comedian Al Murray as a coarse, voluptuary Charles II. The opening of Sean Foley’s production was delayed by a week because it wasn’t ready. Not nearly long enough, it seems.
Based on a real attempt by Irish turncoat and self-proclaimed colonel Thomas Blood (Aidan McArdle, looking Hobbit-like and embarrassed) to steal the Crown Jewels 10 years after the Restoration, it’s full of schoolboy smut, knowing anachronisms and familiar TV faces. Murray and Mel Giedroyc at least demonstrate great audience rapport and comic timing.
But Inbetweeners star Joe Thomas looks lost as Blood’s son while Neil Morrissey seems to have wandered into his wasted role as the drunken, religious-maniac co-conspirator Perrot by mistake. Musical theatre stalwart Carrie Hope Fletcher lustily sings the daft comic songs Nye and composer Grant Olding randomly insert into the action and endures a lot of bosom jokes.
Even so she, like everyone on stage, seemed to be having a better time than I was. The vestigial sets, the non-existent pacing, the arch performances… everything here exudes a knowing, can’t-be-arsed crapness. All underpinned by the assumption that audiences will pay to be hectored by Murray in a version of his Pub Landlord character, only with strangulatedly posh diction and a drag-king wig.
It’s a shame as the source material is golden. The crown jewels, recreated after Cromwell destroyed the originals, were kept in a cupboard in the Tower of London by ancient soldier Talbot Edwards (also played by Murray, with Giedroyc as his slattern wife) and shown to anyone interested.
Blood, aided by an actress (Tanvi Virmani, overacting wildly in a thankless role), stole them, flattening the crown and sawing the sceptre in half to make them portable. He botched the escape but was mysteriously pardoned and given an Irish estate by the King.
At least, that’s what Wikipedia says, which I presume is where Nye did his research. In his hands, this story becomes a vehicle for random jokes about the absurdity of monarchy, British exceptionalism, phalluses and shagging. There are token gestures towards contemporary relevance: Charles’s England is skint and xenophobic.
Though her performance as Edwards’s wife is brash and unsubtle, Giedroyc gives an exquisite demonstration of throwaway lines and endlessly delayed punchlines as a French courtier. And Murray? He’s given license to riff with the audience as the capricious king: sometimes child-like, sometimes lip-lickingly sybaritic, sometimes prone to spittle-flecked fury. Audience members in the front stalls are not safe.
Murray and Giedroyc’s performances are funny because they are funny people. But those performances are not in service to any wider purpose, because there isn’t one here. Though Nye is a fine writer and Foley a shrewd comic director this half-formed show seems to have been slapped together for the amusement of themselves and their onstage chums, rather than to entertain an audience. I’m a Restoration man but this brought out my inner Cromwell.
Garrick Theatre, to 16 September; tickets available here
