Theatre review: Police Cops - The Original and BADASS Be Thy Name

Although there's no sign of The Musical making a return any time soon, the three original, lo-fi comedy shows from Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe aka Police Cops continue to resurface every so often. I've previously caught Police Cops in Space, and now marking their 10th anniversary as a comedy troupe, the three shows have all been playing in rotation. This includes a London residency at Soho Theatre (the one that's actually in Soho,) where I caught the two I hadn't seen before. First up The Original, which was the story they later adapted into The Musical: A 1980s-set American cop show parody in which Hunt's rookie Jimmy Johnson teams up with Roe's grizzled old cop Harrison to take down Parkinson's Fernandez, a Mexican criminal who's sometimes Police Chief Molloy. And also sometimes a cat.

Theatre review: Police Cops in Space

In an otherwise very quiet August as all attention is back on Edinburgh, there was no way I was going to miss the return of the team from my Show of the Year 2023: After the success of Police Cops the Musical which has (so far) played two runs at Southwark Playhouse, the writer-performer team of Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe has gone back to their lo-fi roots: In what feels, given the late announcement, like it might have been plugging a scheduling gap at the Underbelly Festival, they've revived their 2017 show Police Cops in Space. This means just the original trio, minimal comedy props but actually quite a lot of comedy costumes - given Roe's almost complete inability to do the quick-changes without clattering onto the stage with his trousers halfway down his legs. This is not a complaint.

Theatre review: Police Cops: The Musical

A painfully silly musical spoofing 80s pop culture, whose uniformly talented cast includes an impossibly attractive man with comedy facial hair whose clothes keep falling off? Well I can't see what's in it for me. Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson, Tom Roe (book & lyrics) and Ben Adams' (music) Police Cops: The Musical is another in the long line of 1980s tributes/spoofs whose popularity doesn't seem to show any signs of fading, although you'd have to put quite a few of those other shows together to match the sheer relentless stream of gags the company (whose writer-performer trio's company also goes by Police Cops - unusually, no director is credited so presumably they're doing that as well) throw into this spoof of American cop shows and movies, and the action genre more broadly - Lethal Weapon is probably the most obvious comparison, but there's nods to Die Hard, The Karate Kid and even Back to the Future.