It is time we nailed the lie that young people don't go to the theatre. The Lyric Hammersmith was teeming with them on Thursday both for the main house White Devil and for this studio show by Peepolykus, a three-man comedy team. Judging by Goose Nights, they have an avid young fan club that laughs at everything they do; seeing them for the first time, I found them intermittently hilarious but far stronger on visual than verbal invention.
In this show they send up the conventions of classical Greek drama with an updated version of the labours of Hercules. They strike a chord instantly as they form a sombre, black-hatted chorus that advances on the audience to ask: "Is man good or is man evil?" That hits exactly the right note of primal portentousness. Thereafter the show develops the promising idea of a modern Greek waiter plucked from the obscurity of a northern caff to undertake Herculean labours to save mankind. He finds himself wrestling snakes, encountering a mysterious jungle woman and journeying to Hades to meet a rabid Cerberus.
Physically, the trio are enormously inventive. At one point they evoke a funfair ghost-train, complete with robotic axeman, with dazzling economy, and they hurl themselves vigorously into numerous slapstick routines. Clearly the rubber-limbed David Sant, who plays Cerberus, is of the school of Norman Wisdom that believes the more often you fall down the funnier you are. But the show would be an even bigger hit if it stuck more closely to the Greek myth and if the actors didn't keep beating their fragile puns into the ground. The Marx Brothers, who are clearly role models, had SJ Perelman to write their material and anchor their anarchy; here the actors and director Darren Tunstall have devised the script themselves. The difference shows.
For all my caveats, the young audience roared and howled. And there is no denying that the saucer-eyed Sant, the buck-toothed John Nicholson and the laid-back Javier Marzan combine genuine physical dexterity with a sense of comic tradition. Given a first-rate script, who knows what they might achieve?
Until October 28. Box office: 020-8741 2311.
