Images of Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Tony Hancock and Morecambe and Wise play constantly on a screen before the start of Terry Johnson’s brilliant play. It is a reminder of how much comedy has changed since Johnson wrote Dead Funny in 1994: today, as the programme says, we’d be celebrating dead comics such as Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne.
The device adds a patina of nostalgia to the play’s study of marital pain. Not that Johnson is remotely sentimental about his characters, who are devotees of classic comedy. With one striking exception, the members of the Dead Funny Society, who gather to mourn the passing of Benny Hill, are emotionally deficient. Richard, a consultant obstetrician, has totally forsaken sex with his wife. Nick, a teacher, makes brutally misogynist jokes to his own spouse, Lisa, who vainly pretends to have psychic powers. The over-mothered Brian, who has yet to come out of the closet, is nicer than the others. But Richard’s wife, Ellie, who scorns the worship of old comics, is the only one who seems capable of genuine suffering.
Henri Bergson, in his essay on comedy, referred to “the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter”: a point perfectly illustrated by Johnson’s characters. But, in another way, the play subverts Bergson’s thesis by allowing us to both roar with laughter and feel a lump in the throat. Johnson makes excellent use of traditional farcical devices: no sooner are Richard and Ellie engaged in intimate sex therapy than they find themselves rudely interrupted. Yet it is hard not to be moved by the revelations about the reality behind both failing marriages. Like Alan Ayckbourn and Peter Nichols, Johnson has the ability to tap into two totally contradictory responses.
As on its first run in 1994, Johnson directs the play himself. He gets an outstanding performance from Katherine Parkinson as the neglected Ellie. She is hilariously funny in the opening scene where, following the advice of a sex manual, her hand hovers over her naked husband’s inert penis like a nervous butterfly. Yet Parkinson also conveys, through her rueful countenance, the sadness and desperation of a woman driven to the edge of madness by her husband’s physical indifference. Parkinson even brings out the play’s final irony, which is that Ellie, while despising the Dead Funny Society’s anoraks, is the only one with a sense of humour.
The other performances are perfectly good. Rufus Jones as Richard exhibits all the stiffness, except where it really matters, of a man for whom comedy is a matter of mechanistic routines. Ralf Little as Nick suggests laughter is a defence against his own inadequacies and Emily Berrington as Lisa exudes the smugness of the young mother in a childless gang. Meanwhile, Steve Pemberton as Brian has the pathos of a bloke who assumes a hetero roguishness that fools no one except himself.
Comedy may have changed radically since Johnson wrote the play, but it still holds a disturbing mirror up to all those of us who worship at the shrine of dead comics.
• At Vaudeville, London, until 4 February. Box office: 0330-333 4814.
