Theatre review: Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

London's latest version of Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) A Christmas Carol comes with a disclaimer that a number of Christmas Carols, from Channing to Vorderman, will not be appearing at the performance: Yes, Mischief Theatre are back revisiting their Cornley Amateur Dramatic Society alter egos for Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. A version of the story was also their first TV special, but this departs not only from that, but also from the format's usual conceit of only showing us the catastrophic production itself, but with the amateur actors' personalities coming across from the varied brand of chaos each of them brings. Here we get the characters - a couple recast, but an impressive amount of the original actors returning well into the company's second decade in the West End - appearing as themselves in a framing device.

Theatre review: The Comedy About A Bank Robbery

I was apprehensive about whether the latest show from Mischief Theatre, of The PlayThat Goes Wrong and Lights! Camera! Improvise! would live up to their past work; within minutes the opening scene, a prison breakout complicated by cheesy wordplay straight out of a Zucker Bros movie, had proved the company knew what they were doing when they branched out - slightly - from plays going wrong. Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields return as writers and Mark Bell as director of The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, cast almost entirely with familiar faces from their farces and improv shows. The setting is 1950s Minneapolis, and gangster Mitch (Shields) has fled jail and sought out ex-girlfriend Caprice (Charlie Russell.) But he's not after a romantic reunion: Her father Mr Freeboys (Lewis) is the manager of a bank that'll be holding the enormous diamond of a visiting Hungarian prince in its vaults.