Michael Frayn’s collection of 23 sketches for six actors is an amiable throwback to the days of revue. Not every item hits the target and I’m not persuaded that the in-the-round staging is ideally suited to a quickfire form but, at its best, the evening offers some sprightly amusement.
As so often in the past – from the sublime Noises Off to the ill-fated Look Look – Frayn seems fascinated by the processes of theatre itself. A disgruntled contraphonium player sits in an orchestra pit moodily awaiting his brief contribution to an interminable opera. An unctuous theatrical cleric asks us to bless and remember the recently passed interval. The nocturnal habits of scene-shifters are lovingly observed in a hushed David Attenborough-style commentary. There are also well-deserved attacks on self-congratulatory award ceremonies, and impatient sponsors who can’t wait to cut the cackle and get to the canapes.
Satire on theatre’s quaint rituals is accompanied by sharp observation of the strange linguistic patterns of long-married couples. Co-habitation, Frayn suggests, leads to a calculated inarticulacy that prompts one partner to complete the other’s sentences or a wife to expect to be understood when she tells her husband: “The man came about the thing while you were out.” But while Frayn explores language games in the manner of a comedic Wittgenstein, he makes rather too obvious fun of unstoppable garrulity and politicians who mangle words even as they proclaim their desire for clarity.
The essence of revue is also personality, but only two actors in Hamish McColl’s cast transcend the workmanlike. One is Chris Larner, who does all the musical items and who is very good both as the surly denizen of the pit and a benign instrumentalist who finds that his invitation to “tea for two” has exponentially multiplied. The other standout performer is the bouncily versatile Mark Hadfield, who hits the spot as a politician physically embarrassed by a permanently vibrating phone and as a torturer’s quivering victim in a blatant parody of Pinter’s One for the Road.
It’s not an evening that is going to change anyone’s life, but it reminds us that Frayn is an acute observer of absurdities, both in the theatre and the wider world, and also that there is still resonance in revue. With a duff play you’re stuck with it for an evening. But in revue, brevity is the soul of wit, and if one item misfires you know there’ll soon be another along in a minute.
• At Hampstead theatre until 6 June. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
