With the Delightful Sausage’s recent show, plus Crizards in the building next week and this irresistible hour from Crybabies, narrative sketch comedy is having a moment, in Soho theatre at least. Bagbeard has loads going for it: a Stranger Things-alike story that’s three parts ridiculous to one part tender-hearted, lovably knowing meta-theatrical trickery, and no opportunity missed to score a laugh, cheap or otherwise.
It’s impressive how much they cram in – and how dramatic a pitch the show attains as the hour reaches its end. Among a dozen-plus characters, our key protagonists are a sacked teacher nursing thwarted dreams of scientific discovery, a contract killer with a romantic streak, and an extra-terrestrial marooned on an isolated island. Bagbeard (“Heavy is the chin that wears the bag”) brings the trio together in a story that flashes forward and back, via all manner of daft staging devices (shadowplay, montage sequences, musical theatre), and navigates pagan festivals, an alien apocalypse and an evil genius drinking the life force of OAPs en route.
Which is all par for the course, you might say, in this kind of knockabout comic theatre where laughs come easily at this hasty costume change and that apology for a naff stage effect. What marks out Crybabies’ show is that the effects are often rather wonderful, and many of the laughs brilliantly achieved. I’m thinking of the quickfire exchange when smitten hitman Valentine meets the ET-alike Bagbeard, which compromises very smartly with the latter’s limited vocabulary. There are full-tilt, fun performances too from Michael Clarke, Ed Jones and James Gault who deploys his gangly body to eye-catching effect as the creature from another world. Stellar stuff.
At Soho theatre, London, until 21 January and then 7-11 March
