Something misfires in this revival of Trevor Griffiths' play at the Lyric Hammersmith, but I'm not quite sure what it is. Never having seen the play before, I'm not sure whether Sean Holmes the director has made some wrong choices, or whether it's the fact that the play itself is confused. I'm inclined to the latter view; it certainly isn't the fault of the all-male cast, who are excellent. For anyone who doesn't know the story, Griffiths takes a group of would-be standup comedians in Manchester in around 1970. The three acts take place in real time as they meet their tutor in the classroom for a warm-up session before they try out their acts in the local club, then reassemble in the classroom for what is known in military circles as a debrief. The comedy acts are mostly antedeluvian in their political incorrectness by the standards of 2009, relying on racism, sexism and crude stereotyping. But there are plenty of plays from the 1970s that work very well despite the fact that they are now period pieces. Rather than being dated, the racism and sexism in the comedians' scripts adds an extra edginess to the play for a modern audience. I think the problem lies elsewhere. I can't help feeling that once he'd got his premise and his three-act structure and sorted out the characters, the author couldn't quite work out what questions he was trying to raise and how to turn them into a convincing theatrical form. I have to make comparisons with Lee Hall's far superior play The Pitmen Painters, which also starts off with a group of men in a classroom. Hall's play is by far the funnier of the two, thanks to its brilliant dialogue and characterisation, and the subtle way it explores the dynamics of the group. Comedians has five very ordinary comedians and one rule-breaker who may be a creative genius, but they remain a collection of individuals rather than a group. Their coach Eddie Waters (another great performance by Matthew Kelly) is a veteran pre-war comic whose sense of laughter seems to have died inside him. The key scenes are the ones between the mercurial oddball Gethin Price (David Dawson) and Eddie. Dawson, in the part originally played by a young Jonathan Pryce, reminds me a lot of Alan Cumming. But his extended mime show in Act Two goes on a bit too long. There's only one really good joke in the play and it comes right at the end, from the mouth of an Indian immigrant who has wandered into the classroom by accident. That's deliberate. There's a lot of debate and discussion about comedy, but not much of the real thing. It's told and not shown. Of course, the play is about other things than just comedy, but this is where Griffiths' writing seems to me very much at sea. Lee Hall, by contrast, effortlessly builds up from his group of art-loving coalminers a wider context and a range of questions about the nature of art, of class and of cultural aspiration. These questions don't get answered, but they are put with punishing clarity, and it seems to me that this is what Comedians lacks. I left the theatre wondering if my long trek westwards to Hammersmith on the District Line had really been worth it. I'd love to hear from someone who has seen earlier productions of this play and can make comparisons.
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