I went to see The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, from theatre company Mischief Theatre, at the Criterion Theatre in London last Saturday (although actually it was yesterday as I write this; such is the time travel magic of scheduled posting). It’s pretty much what it says on the tin: a Wodehousian farce about a motley gang of crooks of various kinds, led by just-out-of-jail Mitch Ruscitti, trying to break into a 1950s Minneapolis bank to steal a large and very shiny diamond.
Is it funny? Yes; but not unqualifiedly so. Bearing in mind that I am not someone who laughs at a lot of things, there are gags here that are tedious and unfunny, and wordplay about as amusing as the puns that fathers make when they’ve had one or two to drink. Having said that, there are also a couple of set-pieces (one of them involving a fold-up bed and a serial case of mistaken identity) that made me cry with laughter. So, you know, swings and roundabouts.
At the heart of the comedy is something a little more serious, a well-judged vein of sincerity that grounds the cast’s more outrageous antics, especially towards the end of the play. Here we find desperation, and loneliness, and revenge, and a little romance, and some betrayal. All of this registers a vague kind of malaise – the human condition, perhaps – which is too undefined to do anything interesting, but renders the heart of the play slightly…absurdist, I suppose, nihilist in its rejection of stability and meaning.
But comedy’s the most conservative of modes, and despite its refusal to provide some of the consolations of its genre The Comedy About a Bank Robbery is steeped in nostalgia for the fifties, accompanied by self-consciously vintage barbershop melodies sung by the cast which sort of undermine its more deconstructionist gestures. The problem, I think, is that the nostalgic mood this soundtrack generates expresses a yearning for a simpler time – viz., the fifties – when the kind of lines that the play draws between stealing from the rich and murdering the innocent, between petty crooks and dangerous criminals, were somehow more visible and more real.
As is always the case with nostalgia, there never was such a time.
Still, there’s no denying the slickness of the play: it relies heavily on comic timing, on props working properly, on everyone being in the right place on stage at the right time, and it comes together beautifully, a comic dance. Visually and technically, it’s extremely well done (as you might expect from a West End production). Ideologically? Well, your mileage may (and probably will) vary.
The English Student 