It was a bold move for the Lyric to resurrect this old warhorse which, though electrifying in its day, now risks being dismissed as a period piece. When Trevor Griffiths wrote The Comedians in 1975, the ideological battle lines were clearly drawn: while notorious bigots like Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning prowled prime time TV, British theatre was the stomping ground of the left-wing firebrand – the likes of Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, and of course Griffiths himself. This was a Britain arriving at the fag-end of the postwar consensus, on the cusp of Thatcherism and punk. Yet while society may have changed unrecognizably, the climate in which the play was written – recession, strikes, far-right groups on the rise – feels chillingly familiar some 30 years on.
The action unfolds on one long, rain-sodden evening in a Manchester night school, where six amateur comics are gathering for a chance at the big time. Burt Challoner, an influential London talent spotter, is coming north, and the wannabe stand-ups, desperate to escape from dead-end menial jobs, hope to impress him.
Their teacher Eddie Waters (Matthew Kelly), himself a once-great music-hall turn, clings to an idealistic notion of the comedian as truth-teller – “A real comedian dares to see what his listeners shy away from, “ he tells his protoges. But when Challoner (Keith Allen) makes it clear his tastes are strictly lowbrow, most of the group begin wheeling out every racist, misogynist stereotype in the book. We witness their routines in the play’s second act, when the school room is transformed into the stage of a working men’s club and we, the audience, become the punters whose worst instincts are being pandered to.
Then Waters’ favorite pupil, shaven-headed proto-punk Gethin Price (David Dawson), sabotages the show with a disturbing act pitched somewhere between agit prop protest and Dadaist art terrorism. As well as seething with class hatred and social and cultural alienation, this savage parody points up the cruelty of the routines that have gone before.
David Dawson as Price fizzes with a barely-contained nervous intensity. It’s an impressive, sometimes brilliant, performance of immense commitment, but it would benefit from a touch more subtlety. He has a tendency to over-act, and his wired realization of the character too often exhibits itself as a collection of tics and mannerisms. Dawson heavily signposts Price’s otherness from the other standups, which detracts from the shock value of his explosive second act routine. Dawsons’ portrayal is one-dimensional compared to Jonathan Pryce’s unforced but compelling performance in the 1979 BBC Play for Today production that made that actor’s name (see video below).
Director Sean Holmes keeps the ensemble powering along nicely, the expertly drilled cast totally at home with the fast-paced dynamics of Griffith’s knockabout script. Billy Carter and Michael Dylan are excellent as the two Irish comics, while Reece Shearsmith, Mark Benton and Keith Allen are all good value, and in most respects Matthew Kelly is perfect as the world-weary Waters.
But in Act 3 the cast were stretched by both the strengths and the weaknesses of Griffiths’ script. By the time we arrive at the confrontation between Price and his teacher, the play is no longer simply about comedy but the role and relevance of art in society. It’s in these more didactic moments, when Griffiths’ own voice occasionally speaks through his characters as if they were ventriloquists’ dummies, that The Comedians begins to show its age. Yet these scenes also include some of the play’s most powerful writing, not least Waters’ haunting confession of his response to a visit to a Nazi concentration camp (“Something in me loved it”). This is heavyweight stuff, requiring actors who can carry it with absolute conviction. Though they tackle it bravely, Kelly and Davis don’t quite have the range and authority to realize the full power of the scene.
Ultimately, The Comedians eschews soapbox dogma. Like the play’s patient teacher Eddie Waters, Griffiths may not approve of his characters actions, but he does not condemn them. His script is full of dialectical cut and thrust, and a sympathy that acknowledges the gulf between principles and material necessity. Griffiths seems to accept that the function of art is to ask difficult question and to be honest when it cannot answer them. Underneath the rhetoric, it is The Comedians’ probing, questing spirit that has kept it young.
