Last year, they were Johnson and Boswell. This year, Simon Munnery and Miles Jupp step back two centuries, to play the Virgin Queen and her seafaring suitor. Otherwise, the formula is the same. Stewart Lee's script is more late-night floorshow than play, in which Sir Walter Raleigh indulges in a little Elizabethan standup before Her Majesty sails on stage to dispense suspiciously 21st-century-sounding bon mots.
As Daniel Kitson is proving at the Traverse, the combination of standup and theatre can be a potent one. In this instance, it is fun to be addressed by Tudor England with the breezy intimacy of club comedy. The icebreaker is Jupp's Raleigh, cracking jokes about his native Budleigh Salterton, and screening a Powerpoint presentation about the various titles awarded him by Good Queen Bess. As if that were not indication enough of the show's lax attitude to history, in Raleigh's presentation Shakespearean actor Will Kempe strongly resembles Jimmy Carr — who manages to make even Morris dancing antisemitic, jokes Jupp.
Presently, Gloriana herself appears, white-faced and teetering under a massive red wig. The look is Elizabeth, but the delivery is unmistakably Munnery. "To the Italians, I say this," he drones: "Rome wasn't built in a day. Perhaps it would have been if you spoke less with your arms." What follows is a shambolic 40 minutes in which Jupp's Raleigh seeks the Queen's hand in marriage, but instead finds his head on the chopping block as her temper takes a terminal turn.
This is all accomplished with a rough-and-unready charm that barely excuses the show's directionlessness. There are suggestions of the interesting play it could become, as Munnery's monarch wonders aloud whether any avowal of love made to a queen can ever be taken at face value. But Lee's script, and Owen Lewis's production, are addicted to the big joke. Moments of emotional significance are instantly undermined. Raleigh's threatened execution is not dramatic, it is just an excuse for Munnery to take an axe to a potato.
But if the low ambition is regrettable, there is plenty to furnish late-night cheer. Jupp has a neat, unshowy line in Shakespearean dialogue ("My love's queen, goddess of my life, thou dost me wrong"), and the Spanish Armada is evoked, in a pleasingly daft sequence, by the two comics balancing boats on their heads. Elizabeth and Raleigh lacks the heart and stomach of even a weak and feeble woman, but its comic body is in decent working order.
