Kenneth Branagh is certainly giving us a range of productions as part of his year long residency at the Garrick Theatre. We've had Shakespeare, Rattigan, new writing and now a farce.It's ninety minutes of men yelling, falling over cushions, losing their clothes, doing funny walks and simulating gay sex. I found it excruciating and couldn't wait for it to end but it's only fair to report that other people were howling with laughter around me.
Kenneth Branagh plays a contract killer who's rented a hotel room from which to shoot someone attending a trial in the building opposite. In the room next door Rob Bryden plays a suicidal photographer sent by a Swindon newspaper to photograph the same trial. The set is divided in half showing both rooms at the same time. The killer gets embroiled by a camp hotel employee into trying to stop the photographer from killing himself over his wife's affair. During the "hilarity" the wife and her lover show up at various times, he's a psychiatrist and mistakes Branagh for Bryden injecting him with a tranquilliser which makes him dance around a lot and speak in funny voices. They all keep falling over and ending up in positions that newcomers mistake for sex.
There used to be a lot of this kind of thing in the West End. Up until the late seventies there were venues entirely devoted to mildly titillating physical comedy, the kind of play parodied in the back stage farce NOISES OFF and reflected in TV shows like ARE YOU BEING SERVED. Indeed the Garrick Theatre itself was home to NO SEX PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH one of London's longest running hits.
There's no denying there's an art to it. I'm old enough to have appeared in a couple of these shows when I was a young actor and I very much admired my older colleagues who were able to get big laughs just by crashing through a door at the right moment with a suitably silly expression on their face.
Branagh and Bryden certainly have the timing and physical dexterity required without ever quite bringing the edge to the humour required for it to evolve into something which has a place in modern theatre.
I suspect I might have found it more engaging if Branagh had the menace of a killer and Bryden seemed genuinely unhinged. As it is they're both just two nice blokes.
It's almost futile to point out the holes in the facile plot, the improbability of a local newspaper renting an expensive hotel suite for a photographer to cover a national news story, the unlikelihood of anyone spending so much time on land line hotel telephones when everyone uses their mobiles now. But original playwright Frances Veber just needs to get the men tangled up in phone cables in adjacent rooms so they can fall over the cushions.
It's all conceived by adapter/director Sean Foley who's the go-to-guy for this kind of show and is arguably the last great exponent of this dying art form.
Squirming my way through THE PAINKILLER there were plenty of times when I wished someone would take a shotgun and put it out of its misery.
Judging from their laughter I'd guess many people in the press night audience would have given this show four stars. I'd give it two. So let's settle on three.
Miss Atomic Bomb is glamorous, funny and thoroughly wicked. Ignore the doom merchants, of which there have been plenty. The night after the press night, which I couldn't make and seems to have gone badly, the show was firing on all cylinders.