Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson are commemorating 25 years together with a tour that finds them doing almost exactly what they did as Manchester students back in 1976.
In their early incarnation as the Dangerous Brothers, they meted out spectacular cartoon violence on one another; in Bottom, the blows are still raining down. Clearly, punters can't get enough.
But Bottom fritters away the duo's talent. They may disdain intellectualism, but that needn't necessitate such relentless scatology. Their new show, Bottom 2001: An Arse Oddity, first finds the pair on a desert island, then in some mysterious nuclear bunker. Neither scenario is explained. Both play backdrop to a series of loosely related setpieces that tout loud swearing, the genitals of sexual reject Richie and the brutality of simple-minded pisshead Eddie for as many cheap laughs as possible.
It doesn't need to be this way. In the gaps between the puerility, there's some expert knockabout comedy. When Eddie stretches Richie's rubber underpants across half the length of the stage, or when the pair clobber one another to a soundtrack of biffs and bonks, we can't suppress the thrill of vicarious satisfaction.
Choreographed comic violence, like the ad-libbed moments when Mayall forgets his lines, hammers home the event's liveness. Similarly, fiction meets some kind of fact in a mindbending routine explaining that "it's not our fault we're played by such shitty actors". And they wickedly satirise how lazy entertainers patronise local crowds.
Ten years ago, Mayall and Edmondson starred in Waiting for Godot in the West End. Today, they compare their Bottom with Beckett. What Godot gave them that An Arse Oddity doesn't, however, was a provocative framework for their shtick, an ambition beyond simple tomfoolery. Mayall and Edmondson have the charisma and the craft for brilliant live performance. If only they could put their bottoms behind them.
• Bottom is at the Barbican, York (01904 656688), tonight, the Cliffs Pavilion, Southend (01702 351135), Saturday, then tours across Britain until December 3.
