FUNNY ABOUT THE UNFUNNY
Billy Bash, rated the third most offensive comedian in Britain, was once the dominant partner in Biddle and Bash. He’s still on tour, God help us, and in his big white tux heading for one of our more dilapidated Spa Pavilions. First he’s dropping in on the other half of the act, Cliff, for reasons we will find out. Cliff has not moved onward and upward to the Cheadle Hulme mansion set in the forty years since: designer Sarah Beaton has lovingly created every grimy smear and exhausted cushion in his maisonette beside the bitter Irish Sea. As he waits there Billy flicks contemptuously through an old showbiz journal. “Dead. dead . dead. Cancer . Banged up for nonceing. Dead’. He has prospered: after the fairly innocent postwar cheekiness of ‘The Whoopsie boys”, duos like theirs were driven off the air by the pious Ben Elton revolution, but Billy see-sawed defiantly back, to take the racial and sexist material further a la Bernard Manning. So he continues to delight the substantial niche of unreconstructed louts who love him even more for being condemned by the Guardian and the BBC. “Comedy’s not supposed to be nice! Real people want to laff again”
Nigel Betts gives the role every bullying inch, even when (for quite a lot of the play) he is clearly on the edge of a serious cardiac event. Like Jimmy Savile, Billy is confident that his charity work (“kids’ hospitals, you look a right cunt if you don’t”) mean that he is in credit with God and the universe and will do just fine. Meanwhile Edward Hogg’s Gulliver, twisting with giggly camp self-abasement, explains that he is the upstairs lodger who helps Cliff out: he will become a moving force later, in the elegantly twisted plot which I will not spoil. But it’s Nigel Cooke’s Cliff who holds the play’s pleasingly appalled centre: he first appears unexpectedly from the showbiz-red drapes in the shallow bay window, a figure brilliantly and unsettlingly weird beyond even our expectation in a tattered vest and cardigan, goggling through thick specs, complaining that he’s been thrown out of the local Tabernacle for weirdness, and wondering whether his pet python Agadoo has escaped again. After a while he nips out and reappears in a shabby Little Noddy outfit, yellow scarf and all, demanding a comeback. Perhaps a reprise – fully demonstrated to chokes of audience laughter – of his karaoke Kate Bush. You’ll rarely see a more bravura performance than Cooke doing that in a Noddy suit and shawl. But does he really want to face an audience ? As Billy says “Stockton gasfitter’s social club – do you want to go through that again?” Cliff is inspiredly odd. And potentially very dark indeed, as is Gulliver. Something awful happened, fit for blackmailable memoirs, in their joint past.
The oppressive nature of the terrible double-act’s former relationship becomes clear through splendid banter along the lines of “Only way you’ll get inside a woman is with a donor card”. At some point along the way we learn that Cliff’s decline was partly from an onstage injury at Billy’s hands, and partly because he was repeatedly arrested for indecency ( masturbating off the pier because “Rod Hull told him that’s how you get mermaids pregnant”). At some point he got religion after “Keith Chegwin talked to him about Jesus”.
Well , you get the references, and very entertaining they all are, names artfully chosen to be beyond legal complaint. A decade ago Mark Jagasia used his background in tabloid journalism to give us the enjoyably terrifying CLARION here, with Greg Hicks as a barking-right editor. I quaveringly described it as the “howl of an England struggling without grace for identity, and a newsprint industry in decline”. This author seems to be that rare thing, a darkly observant, slightly pessimistic spirit who properly understands that the way to come at doubts and unease about your country is through comedy, provided you put the craft in and overlay the acid with half-shocked barks of audience laughter. An ex-showbiz hack and product of that Blackpoolish north-west himself, after a few years of explosive scandals he has hit on a good moment to dramatize the feeling that, as he muses in the programme, “there was always something a little weird and creepy about British light entertainment, an intimation of darkness beyond the brightly lit pier”.
And it’s come off beautifully. Though we may never know, in the final thunderstorm scene, whether the python was really imaginary. Oscar Pierce directs a remarkable three-man cast with killer precision create a two hour treat. Or as the director puts it, a “dark-comedy farce absurdist satire gothic-horror revenge tragedy mystery play”.
arcolatheatre.com. to 22 feb
rating 4
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