After a nail-biting delay of the kind that International Rescue would surely never countenance, and just when it looked as if the mission might be aborted, Andrew Dawson and Gavin Robertson flew into the West End in another daring attempt to cash in on the current Thunderbirds revival.
The duo's show began almost 20 years as a small-scale Scottish tour of obscure arts centres but quickly became a cult hit, and it has been in and out of the West End since 1989. This revival offers the opportunity to watch at least three generations of small boys, both on the stage and in the audience, enjoying themselves while wearing silly hats.
The evening begins with Space Panorama, a tabletop recreation of the 1969 lunar landing. Robertson provides a commentary that is an enter taining mix of the portentous and the ironic, while Dawson's hands play all the characters as well as rockets, clouds, moon and so on. Dawson's hands would pass an audition for Rada without the rest of him attached, and part of the pleasure of this piece is watching his inventiveness and technical brilliance.
Yet the 25-minute piece, more rewarding when seen in an intimate setting, is clearly only a filler to extend the evening to a standard West End length and allow for a profitable interval that lasts longer than the first half of the performance. Then it is down to the main event. Except that it never feels like a main event. Thunderbirds FAB is an affectionate, good-natured show with really funny moments, but it seems like the sort of thing you'd have caught in an arts centre 20 years ago. That's even allowing for Graham Johnston's nifty, low-key design and Jon Linstrum's clever lighting, which give the show a bit of a gloss.
Otherwise this is basically a comedy of recognition and nostalgia that gets its laughs from Dawson's ability to recreate a marionette walk and the immobile features of Gerry Anderson's original creations, what with Lady Penelope as a guy in drag and Captain Scarlet a drag in red.
It is all enjoyable enough, but who it is really for? The humour is surely too unsophisticated and the send-up too underplayed to really appeal to adults, while the five-year-old fans of the current TV reruns seem to take it deadly seriously and haven't heard of irony. If your hopes of getting Tracy Island for Christmas are doomed, a ticket to this is unlikely to bring solace.
Booking to January 21. Box office: 020 7316 4747.
