Theatre review: The Comeback

In between booking new shows that will almost certainly get cancelled or postponed by Lockdown Four, there's time to squeeze in a show postponed by Lockdown Three - I was due to see Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen's The Comeback in December last year, but it's returned to finish its run at the Noël Coward for a few weeks this month. Ashenden and Owen are the sketch comedy duo best known for The Pin on Radio 4, and they write and perform this show that's an attempt to mix that kind of sketch show with a farcical narrative: Although Morecambe and Wise didn't say "fuck" on stage quite as often that's definitely the comic tradition that's in The Pin's DNA, and similarly The Comeback has clear echoes of Hamish McColl and Sean Foley's Morecambe and Wise tribute The Play What I Wrote, which was a West End (and, improbably, Broadway) hit twenty years ago.

Ashenden and Owen play two pairs of comedy actors, one of which is themselves, or at least their personas as The Pin. They're on tour as the support act for ancient comedy duo Jimmy and Sid, whose comeback tour hasn't been the hit they were hoping for.

When they hear that a Hollywood director is in the audience both duos see their opportunity to impress him and give their careers a boost, and when Alex accidentally knocks out Sid the younger pair decide to properly sabotage the older one and take the spotlight. So much for the story, which is, unsurprisingly, just an excuse to fit in as many sketches from their radio repertoire as possible, mixed in with a lot of new physical comedy. In the story, Alex and Ben are doing old material and wondering if they should try something new and untested; Jimmy and Sid are tanking with new material, and thinking they should give the audience some of the old stuff they love. The real Alex and Ben have gone for a bit of both: If you listen to the Radio 4 show you'll recognise a lot of the gags (the one about the old man feeding them fruit gets a whole extended lease of life,) but increasingly the farce and new material take over.

Directed by Emily Burns, The Comeback takes advantage of the move to a live medium to really play with theatrical conventions, especially around the doubling of roles: Rosanna Vize's set gives a lot of entrances and exits for actors to suddenly disappear and reappear in a different guise, and the joke that, despite the fifty-year age difference, Ben can easily be mistaken for Sid and Alex for Jimmy gets a lot of tongue-in-cheek use. I loved the running gag of them using the very simple theatrical device of them being onstage when they entered from one end of the curtain, and backstage when they entered from the other, and then completely forgetting how it worked so they were repeatedly baffled by a chair they left on stage turning up in the dressing room.

In what's probably another conscious nod to The Play What I Wrote, there's also a revolving cast of celebrity cameos: The likes of Serena McKellen, Claire Balding, David Baddiel and Steve Pemberton have appeared so far, and this afternoon Sanjeev Bhaskar took on the role of the stooge thrown into a confusing sketch, before getting caught up in the backstage shenanigans and eventually getting tasered. Tapping into a cheesy and warm-hearted, old-fashioned comedy without feeling like a museum piece, The Pin's comedy is the kind of thing we need right now and The Comeback deserves to be the career springboard their fictional counterparts are desperate for (although this being the 21st century, realistically it's more likely to be the fact that their sketches went viral during lockdown that does it - certainly today's audience seemed to skew much younger than most West End matinees.) It's the kind of comedy that knowingly aims for groans as much as laughs, but certainly gets a lot more laughs.

The Comeback by Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen is booking until the 25th of July at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.