Lee Evans is one of comedy's most versatile superstars. He can fill arenas with his stand-up shows, he can do Samuel Beckett and he was sensational in the stage version of The Producers. So quite what he is doing in this steaming pile of potty-mouthed would-be farce is a bit of a mystery. The late Clive Exton's play, written in 2005, has never been performed before and judging by its opening night I think I can see why.
Evans plays Darnley Packer, the dimmest member of a pretty dim clan of amoral Essex criminals. Sheila Hancock plays matriarch Emmie, Keeley Hawes plays his orange-skinned moll Chrissie and Karl Johnson, best known to comedy fans for playing the indecipherable yokel in Hot Fuzz, is a doddery hit man who, like this play, should have been put out to grass years ago.
Screechy hell breaks loose in the zebra and leopard skin-patterned des res at the start when the mob hear that younger son Algie is coming home. The trouble is that the rest of the family has spent his ill-gotten loot in his absence. So they've got to go on the run before he gets back and also bump off anyone who gets in their way.
This set-up has the makings of a decent black comedy, a door-slamming, pistol-firing cocktail of Ray Cooney and Joe Orton, but somehow it doesn't work. The tone feels completely wrong and the pace is uneven. Most of the laughs come from the copious swearing, but this is a lazy way of getting a giggle. It is not Martin Amis coming up with new creative ways to be pungent, it is impressively lively 80-year-old Sheila Hancock – the best thing here – saying "you cunt".
I could go into the ethics of being mean about Essex stereotypes, but in some ways that is not the issue. The real disappointment is the waste of such a good cast and, in particular, Evans. The nervy, high-energy comedian is a brilliant physical clown, but he appears to have made the decision here to rein it in, which is constantly at odds with the fact that everything else is revved up.
If only he had played to his strengths maybe one could have overlooked the holes in the script. There are, for example a couple of moments when he almost breaks into classic Evans movements – sliding off a chair, doing a slo-mo run – but then he seems to pull back when I suspect the audience would have liked him to have gone much further over the top. This is particularly infuriating in the frustratingly flat second half when he performs a restrained samba in full Latin-lover costume that is so tight around the hips one can almost see his maracas. Evans fans will surely want him to let rip.
The result is a play that won't really delight anyone except lovers of four-letter expletives. Not dark enough to be a black comedy, not slapstick enough to be a farce, not clever enough to be a satire. Barking in Essex is simply a real dog's dinner.
