Previously I’ve had a Scrooge-like aversion to the strenuous madcappery of Mischief Theatre but this revival of their farce about a malfunctioning amateur version of Charles Dickens’s Christmas fable had me laughing out loud. The brash, obvious, knockabout humour is laced with moments of lightning-flash wit and invention. It’s performed with verve by a cast prominently featuring some of the company’s founder members – three of whom wrote the script – and regular collaborators, who all met at drama school.
It’s an utterly (but not fussily) democratic show where everyone gets their moment in the sun and all dignity is sacrificed in favour of laughs. The direction by Matt DiCarlo - an American addition to the Mischief fold since they went transatlantic – is brisk and the stage management of the collapsing props and pratfalls impeccable. And underneath all the foolery, it’s a pretty faithful rendering of the original story, where the re-education of Scrooge parallels a journey to self-knowledge for the amdram show’s arrogant director Chris (Daniel Fraser). All this, and there’s a giant, ventriloquist-dummy version of Tiny Tim, too, that looms over the action like one of the lethal automata from Squid Game. God help us, every one.
It opens during auditions for the Corney drama society, which are pointless as the same seven hopeless people turn up each year and Chris always casts himself in the lead anyway. Lots of gags are meticulously set up here to be paid off later. Sandra (Sasha Frost) can play “all three emotions: happy, sad and hungry” and will duly do so in the desperate hope of a mention in the local newspaper.
Friendless Dennis (Jonathan Sayer) can’t remember lines so his dialogue will be written on the set and costumes: inevitably he ends up saying everything he reads, from the minutes of a secret meeting about replacing Chris to the word “Ikea” on the bottom of a glass. Jonathan (Greg Tannahill) has a terror of heights following an unspecified accident in a previous production of Peter Pan. (JM Barrie’s play “went wrong” in a previous Mischief Christmas show.)
Mayhem escalates. Techie Trevor (Chris Leask) rams his van through the back wall of the stage. The set model is destroyed and replaced with a Malteser box and a hot-pink toy kitchen (which is *definitely* not a Barbie trademark infringement), later realised full-size. Arrogant ham Robert (Henry Lewis), endless proud that he once played Hamlet nude, is allocated a single line – “yes” – so spends most of the show working to make Chris “completely incapacitated” so he can take over.
Sayer and Lewis wrote the script with fellow company founder Henry Shields, who usually also acts but doesn’t appear this time. And Lewis’s performance may be the defining one of this show. He’s a big, loud bear of a man and a natural clown, who has necessarily taken up space and attention in other Mischief productions, from their debut work The Play That Goes Wrong (now on its umpteenth year and cast at the Duchess Theatre) to last year’s hilarious The Comedy About Spies.
Here, in a performance utterly without vanity, he spends most of the time stuck inside a giant parcel, purely so he can deliver the line: “I am the ghost of Christmas present.” He wrings astonishingly varied laughs from the word “yes”. And there’s even a hint of pathos in Robert’s wish to impress his estranged young son, Fleance (named for Banquo’s son in Macbeth, theatre nerds).
Throughout, the slapstick is expertly handled. Tannahill’s Jonathan, as Jacob Marley, ends up dragging a chair, a bed and the hapless Trevor across the stage in his chains. Later, Trevor plays a top-heavy version of the spectre he calls The Ghost of Christmas Who’s About to Come, and demolishes the graveyard set. “Who cares about the review?” the cast ask after the curtain has come down on their amateur shambles, and it must be said that Mischief are probably critic proof by now. But for what it’s worth, I’m a convert.
Apollo Theatre, to Jan 26; mishchiefcomedy.com
