3 SEPTEMBER 2005, Page 30

Dated caper

Lloyd Evans

Tom, Dick and Harry Duke of York’s Russian National Mail Old Red Lion Simplicity isn’t a virtue that Ray Cooney has any time for. Here’s the set-up for his new farce Tom, Dick and Harry. Childless Tom and his soppy-stern wife Linda have two goals in life, to adopt a baby and to snap up the large rented house in which they currently live with Tom’s feckless brother, Dick. Dick, a smuggler, has returned from Calais with a van full of booze and a couple of Kosovans stowed in the back.

Meanwhile, Tom’s second brother, Harry, has hit on a plan to help Tom buy his rented home at a knockdown rate. He steals a bag of body parts from a hospital morgue and proposes to bury them in the backyard where they’ll be discovered by workmen carrying out garden renovations. With the property exposed as a ‘House of Horror’, its value will plummet, bringing it within the range of Tom’s meagre income. These conflicting themes converge, by a happy accident, on the very morning that Tom and Linda are to be visited by Mrs Potter, an official from the adoption agency, who will assess their suitability as parents and determine their future happiness. See what I mean? Not simple.

Though some of these elements are plainly ridiculous none of them is actually funny. A packed auditorium watched in respectful silence as the elaborate plot was laid out, piece by careful piece, during the opening mirthless 30 minutes. The dialogue is trite, the jokes are dated. The few small pleasures come from Joe McGann (Tom) as he capers around trying to rein in his charmless brethren and keep a lid on their half-witted machinations. The first act reaches a climax with the three lads grappling over the corpse-filled bin-liner just as the fearful Mrs Potter enters. The bag splits open, the limbs fly everywhere, the boys blush and Mrs Potter looks cross. Blackout. Curtain. Head for the bar.

After the interval a new authority figure appears, a Russian gangster wielding a gun. Mrs Potter is reduced to the status of Second Irritant, a bustling matron who can be shoved in and out of bedrooms whenever the show needs a burst of slapstick. This is the defining fault of the script, a cavalier attitude towards its own material. The trouble is that Cooney, whose son Michael helped write the show, has zero interest in human personality. The characters are types, their utterances platitudes, and this fatal shortfall makes the show not just dull but incredible. At one point a policeman enters, asks a few questions and exits. After a long interlude, he reappears claiming to have forgotten to ask a further question. This seems forced and contrived but the error might be easily corrected. If the copper were drawn as an embittered snoop with nothing better to do, then his surprise return would seem not only plausible but dramatically tense. The Cooneys haven’t the virtuosity even for such minor efforts of brushwork. One of the three brothers (I forget which) exits the play on the line, ‘Hear about the Irishman who fired an arrow into the air? He missed.’ That’s not just a lack of invention, that’s a scriptwriter ditching his responsibilities with a sod-you shrug. But tedious and silly as this show is, I wouldn’t bet against it being a hit. Cooney’s plays have sold 100 million tickets worldwide. More than virtually anyone.

Acclaimed playwright Oleg Bogaev is new to these shores. He arrives courtesy of Sputnik Theatre whose directors plan to lavish us with the best in new Russian writing. Odd perhaps to name their company after a defunct line of orbiting rustbuckets built and bunged skywards during the preBrezhnev era. Somehow it sends the wrong signal. Anyway, their first import is a satirical fantasy, rich in ideas but poor at dramatic development. Pensioner Ivan hobbles around his flat trying to make sense of post-Soviet Russia. He spends the first act writing silly letters to celebrated personalities: Lenin, Trotsky, Yuri Gagarin and Elizabeth II. In the interval, during a urinal break, it occurred to me that Oleg Bogaev was an anagram of Leave Bog Go. But I stayed.

In the second half, Ivan’s correspondents all suddenly materialised in his living room and were joined by Marshall Zukhov and Vivien Leigh. A plethora of comic possibilities seemed to open up but the play shrank into a tedious row between the Queen and Lenin over who owned the flat. The Queen won. Lenin lost. But not as heavily as the audience. Let’s hope Sputnik follow up this maiden bellyflop with a play that really flies.