Death has been ubiquitous in the theatre this week; but Complicite's Lyttelton revival of their 1984 show, with the original rubber-limbed cast, takes to fresh extremes our nervous embarrassment in the face of mortality. Disproving Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost, the three performers prove that it's perfectly possible to move wild laughter in the throat of death.
Seeing the show for the first time, I was struck by its mix of old business and new angles.
Simon McBurney, in anorak and specs, is the archetypal klutz reminiscent of Norman Wisdom and Mr Bean. In a cemetery, he only has to lean on a gravestone for it to fall apart.
At a funeral party, he is the awkward guest unsure with whom to commiserate. Best of all is the scene in church where he is always out of synch with his fellow-mourners and one fatal step behind their ostentatious gestures of prayer.
The gags themselves are familiar: what is unusual is seeing them applied to this subject. And, if the show has an underlying theme, it is our inability to cope with the rituals of death.
One of the best episodes shows Jozef Houben, an attenuated Belgian, trying to extract a death certificate for his mother from Marcello Magni's bureaucratic registrar. "Did she fall asleep?" asks the sympathetic official.
Working his way through a catalogue of euphemisms, Magni is finally driven to manically simulating every known medical form of expiry.
Much of the time I wept with laughter.
But the show, while dazzlingly executed, also reminds one how Complicite has moved on in the intervening 21 years. Not only have they, as their work on Shakespeare, Brecht and Berger proves, applied themselves to text, they have also shed the slightly self-conscious cleverness into which they occasionally lapsed.
One vignette here, where Houben's madcap undertaker drives a hearse as if he's in the grand prix, has nothing much to say about death: it is simply there to demonstrate the trio's mimetic expertise.
Even the adagio-like ending, where McBurney's bereaved husband potters about his house exploring the mundane practicalities of loss, seems structurally awkward.
But I've no wish to carp at such a liberatingly funny show.
What it does, at best, is combine graveyard humour with acute observation of our paralysed inarticulacy in the face of death.
· In rep until February 26. Box office: 020-7452 3000
