Once they were The Young Ones; now they’re “a couple of old dinosaurs”. The tectonic plates have shifted and Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer are teetering on the edge of extinction. Vulcan 7, a new stage comedy written by and starring the erstwhile Vyvyan and Neil, and directed by Steve Marmion, is about two ageing actors stuck in their trailer on the slopes of an Icelandic volcano. A send-up of showbiz egos and a peek into the hollow heart of a life spent pretending to be someone else, it starts like a bad sitcom and ends like good Beckett.
The first half is all talk and dramatic stasis. We’re on the set of bargain-bucket sci-fi movie, Vulcan 7, starring old-school thesp Hugh Delavois (Planer) as a butler, and loose cannon Gary Savage (Edmondson) in an undignified costume as an alien insectoid. The pair have previous: they went to Rada together and shared girlfriends before their careers diverged: for Gary, movie stardom and self-destruction; for Hugh, character parts, bourgeois life and an MBE.
That’s what they rake over, in circles, in act one, marooned in Hugh’s trailer while Eyjafjallajökull rumbles ominously outside. It’s amusing enough, as “Scorsese’s go-to maniac” Gary pussyfoots around #MeToo sensitivities, and Hugh bitches about Daniel Day-Lewis. But there’s nothing at stake until after the interval, when their plight gets more desperate, their relationship to a runner, Leela (Lois Chimimba), gets complicated, and Inuit shamanism introduces a welcome degree of weird theatricality.
The play threatens to be, but never quite is, a reckoning with or requiem for the tainted romance of the acting profession. “I am an artist!” Gary insists – but home-wrecking, alcoholism and arrested development (“I’ve never cooked a chicken!”) come as part of the package. Those darker currents churn like lava beneath what remains a light comedy – until the closing stages edge our heroes closer to the inferno. Vulcan 7 leaves us with a striking picture of two thesps out of time, perched on the abyss with only envy, regret and their exemplary recall of King Lear for company.
• At Cambridge Arts theatre until 6 October. Then touring.
