Drop the Dead Donkey

In an era when anything from oceanic disasters to covert military operations have been adapted into musicals, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkins must have tempted to throw a few show tunes into their revival of nineties sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey. Thankfully, we were spared Neil Pearson belting out Joe Jackson's Sunday Papers, in favour of a straight play that captured the spirit, if perhaps not the nuance, of the original show. The idea of getting the band back together must have been especially appealing for a production that, almost uniquely back then, followed the American template of an ensemble cast. It's easy to forget that, at the time, the actors that appeared at the Theatre Royal were relatively unknown.

The Reawakening, as the show is subtitled, opens with Jeff Rawle's George operating a coffee machine. Immediately, the audience is divided between those familiar with his disastrous bad luck, fully primed to expect the inevitable, and folk less familiar with the show's long running gags. It was one of several tiny nods to the original - Dave's philandering, Sally's promiscuousness, Gus's rhetoric - that had those of us already worshipping at the temple smug with knowing smiles at what they were on about. The cast obviously had a similarly marvellous time, bouncing off each other with infectious good humour. Did this blind us to the play's weaknesses? Probably. I dare say that my memory of the show itself is rose tinted too. But if wallowing in nostalgia is an inexcusable crime then I plead guilty, as critical facilities crumbled in the face of a show that was simply, and unapologetically, silly good fun.

The set up was as follows. Former employees of Globelink news were recruited by the newly formed Truth News. The characters reunite with a mix of delight and horror in a neat device to both explain their circumstance and their background to the half dozen folk in the audience who hadn't seen the show. As Dave Carnley comments, it was like the bizarre version of an Agatha Christie play, and thereafter never took its rationale too seriously. As the TV series progressed the characters became more rounded, but the show remained a vehicle for topical gags, and the play followed that template. There were hints of something more substantial - Damien's ill mother, Dave's tagging, George's girlfriend - but such things were largely unexplored in favour or one-liners and the electrocution of a national treasure. A mix of great and good jokes made for an entertaining evening and easy laughs, but in those fragmentary moments of pathos, I wondered whether we were watching the remnants of a more substantial earlier draft.

The cast, as you would expect from actors that went on to do so much more, were excellent, with Neil Pearson, Stephen Tompkinson and Jeff Rawle on particularly fine form. Victoria Wicks's Sally was suitably horrific, though more than most seemed to miss the late David Swift. Without Henry Davenport to bounce off, the writer's seemed unsure what to do with her character, though she fared better than the underwritten Helen, with Ingrid Lacey having markedly less to do than the rest of the cast. Susannah Doyle was similarly marginalised in an unconvincing HR role, the blame for her less convincing contribution largely the fault of the writers. With Robert Duncan's odious Gus pulling the whole thing together, one couldn't help notice how much more comfortably Hamilton and Jenkin fleshed out the male roles.

The main shortcoming of the production, however, was no one's fault, other than the news outlets that the show seeked to satirise. It's hard to mock the likes of GB and Fox News when the absurdities of post truth media outpace anything Hamilton and Jenkins can come up with. Globelink news wrestled with a decline into tabloid journalism but was grounded in a kind of reality. Judged by the standards of today, it was a bastion of fine reporting, notwithstanding Damien's serendipitous teddy bear. While it was lovely to see the band back together again, it's therefore little wonder that satire was ultimately trumped by farce in a likeable but ultimately lightweight production.