★☆☆☆☆
Around half an hour into The Crown Jewels, the Carolean comedy currently taking up space in the Garrick Theatre, it’s hard to escape the feeling the cast are in a bit of a rush.
Peddling through their lines several orders of magnitude faster than you’d expect, there’s hardly any room left for the audience to laugh. Since most of the jokes so far have comprised entirely of obvious sex puns and a pastry shaped like a penis, that’s probably for the best.
But still, it’s odd to see a cast full of some of Britain’s finest comedians (including Mel Giedroyc, Joe Thomas and Neil Morrissey) display all the comic timing of a wet sock at a bus stop. Something, a curious mind might suggest, is afoot.
Mel Giedroyc is criminally underused as ‘French Noblewoman’ (Photo: Hugo Glendinning)
That something is Al Murray, making his theatrical stage debut as King Charles II. At the end of the first half the show’s plot grinds to a screeching halt as Murray gives a Herculean demonstration of his stand-up prowess. In about ten minutes of heavily improvised material, he takes the crowd’s energy levels from their lowest ebb to induce manic shrieks of laughter. It’s an appreciative change of pace, if one that can’t help but feel like it was added last-minute to prevent a mass walkout at the interval.
The Crown Jewels is about as bad as a stage show containing a half-dozen exceptional comedians can be. Telling the little-known and deceptively interesting tale of a 17th-century attempt to steal the titular trinkets, the play somehow takes a relatively sure-fire comedic premise and renders it both comedically and dramatically incoherent. The laughs, somehow front-loaded despite the butchered pace, universally come despite the script, not because of it. Frankly, I’ve never seen a play so toweringly packed with jokes surgically designed to miss their mark.
Joe Thomas, Aidan McArdle and Neil Morrissey are given the unenviable task of delivering most of the plot (Photo: Hugo Glendinning)
That might have been forgivable, had the laughter drought come at the expense of plot. But somehow, the historical heist element gets completely lost in the melee. It’s hard not to feel bad for a cast practically shouting their way through their lines in a desperate, multi-faceted attempt to eek a single laugh from any punchline over the course of two hours.
Special mention in that regard has to go to Carrie Hope Fletcher, nominally in the role of the tower warden’s daughter (she also bursts into song every twenty minutes for reasons entirely unrelated to her character). Not only do her musical interludes demonstrate her genuinely impressive singing voice, but her entertainingly earnest delivery probably gets the closest to making any of Nye’s script remotely watchable. Adonis Siddique, too, shows off some impressive comic chops as a charmingly mild-mannered footman.
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At one moment in the play’s first act, Aidan McArdle’s Colonel Blood treats the audience to a brief, Borat-esque delivery of “ma wife.” That line went down about as well as the rest of the show. Lavish sets, a magnificent old theatre and Britain’s finest comedy stars can’t save a production which frankly should have made it nowhere near a West End stage. Probably best to give it a miss.
The Crown Jewels is playing at the Garrick Theatre until 16 September before embarking on a national tour. Tickets are available here.
