You have to admire the marketing skills of Mischief Theatre, the team behind West End smash The Play That Goes Wrong and more recently The Comedy About A Bank Robbery. A week ago I received a friendly yet slightly menacing handwritten letter in the post from them asking why I had not seen their latest production yet and why I had been singing the praises of Michael McIntyre’s occasional shows at the Duchess Theatre and not The Play That Goes Wrong which is on there every week. So it seemed only fair that I made amends quickly. You don’t want to make enemies of people who have a grudge and your home address.
This is one of the easiest reviews to write. If you liked The Play That Goes Wrong – and why not? – of course you will love The Comedy About A Bank Robbery. Both excel at good old fashioned farce, inspired acrobatic, knockabout slapstick and the kind of excruciatingly childish puns which make Tim Vine seem like Noam Chomsky.
The difference here is that the latest production is set not in stuffy old England but in America in the doo-wopping 1950s. There is more of a musical element here to draw in fans of Grease, Hairspray, even The Jersey Boys. The plot finds a gang of hoods busting out of the slammer and planning a heist to steal Prince Ludwig’s massive diamond being stored in a local Minneapolis bank vault – lord knows why it’s there but who cares? This is about fun not narrative nuance.
The first half of the play sets up the action and introduces the characters. There is plenty of farcical nonsense as fake seagulls fly past windows, doors slam, folding beds flip up and down, fake moustaches are donned and mistaken identity becomes a theme.
But it is the second half when the robbery is carried out that is really impressive, thanks to a couple of showstopping set-pieces. One spectacular scene is played out at a mind-bendingly gravity-defying angle rather than horizontally, which means that even pouring a cup of coffee onstage gets a chuckle.
And when it comes to the actual theft, Mitch (Henry Shields – one of the co-writers with Henry Lewis who plays the barking bank owner and Jonathan Sayer who plays the ageing intern) and gold-digger with a heart Caprice (Charlie Russell) have to shimmy down ropes and avoid touching the floor or waking the security guard. Caprice neatly sings a lullaby along with the noisy drilling to keep him asleep.
Add to this a couple of imaginatively staged car chases and the mandatory farce element of people walking unexpectedly into rooms and trousers being unexpectedly removed and, holy Brian Rix, you got a thing of hilariously silly beauty. Feel free to leave your brain in neutral. It’s not remotely intelligent. But mindless fun has rarely been so enjoyable.
Booking until April 2017. Info here.
Picture by Darren Bell.
