Absurdia

Peter Capaldi in A Resounding Tinkle

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," the trashcan-bound Nell tells us in Samuel Beckett's Endgame, and surely not very much is sadder than a comedy that doesn't land. Such was the distinct feeling in the air at the opening night performance of the eagerly anticipated Absurdia, a great idea for a theatrical triptych scuppered by one case of severe miscasting, general misdirection, and the ongoing realisation that comedy done well is—sorry, Woody Allen—the most serious game in town. Given Britain's great comic tradition, why not re-examine the theatrical roots of absurdist humour in that era (the 1950s) before such humour was passed on to the province of TV, specifically Monty Python. This is a landscape where people await the arrival at their suburban bungalow of an elephant, unaffectedly continue to knit a lampshade and (in the best joke of the night) announce the interval before a single thing has begun. But I doubt I'm the only one to whom it occurred that one reason Douglas Hodge's strained 85-minute staging has no interval is to prevent sizeable portions of the audience from catching an early train home.

The first two-thirds of the evening are from the distinguished pen of NF Simpson, the octogenarian who is happily still on hand to usher his theatrical iconoclasm into a still-new century. Less happy is the near-immediate awareness that leading man Peter Capaldi isn't the right player for a highly stylised piece that ought to come at us bearing an absence of style, as if the characters were simply living the most ordinary lives imaginable. After all, why wouldn't we one day open the door to find that our favourite uncle has undergone a sex change and instead is now a female sex bomb by way of Jean Shrimpton and the like? (The part is assumed with hip-hugging élan by Lyndsey Marshal.) That's just one of the series of daft occurrences that takes place in the first, and longest, of the trio, Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle, in which a dotty couple by the name of Paradocks (get it?) make snake-related phallic jokes and debate the efficacy of all of a sudden running for office. At the end of the play, Vicki Mortimer's perfectly patterned period set dramatically falls forward, as if to pay homage to the all-but-forgotten penchant of collapsing scenery that not long ago characterised every third London play.

Lyndsey Marshal and Peter Capaldi in THe Crimson Hotel

Capaldi was having a visibly uncertain time of the first play at the press performance and recovered himself for the third play by essentially sitting to one side during the second: a playlet from Simpson called Gladly Otherwise about an unidentified Man (John Hodgkinson), who arrives at the suburban home of a couple called Brandywine and proceeds to play interlocutor on every manner of topic—from the husband's weight to the all too visible absence of wallpaper. "You should try to get a lot more glibness into your whole approach," Man urges Judith Scott's Mrs. Brandywine in between plying her with questions, in one of the more unusual exhortations in dramatic history. At the end of the sketch, the set collapses once more, as if to indicate just how theatrically fragile this sort of verbal jousting in fact is.