Tom Wicker

Director Lisa Peterson’s production is sturdily reliably in the early expositional scenes, but really takes flight when the dividing line between reality and Levant’s worsening mental state begins to dissolve. There’s a grippingly feverish quality to how Rachel Huack’s dressing room and studio sets end up sharing stage space. Privacy no longer exists with cameras turned on couches. It's fragmentary and frantic – culminating in a truly virtuosic piano performance by a spotlit Hayes, who looks agonisingly at his own hands as if they belong to a stranger. It’s hauntingly powerful and the apex of this funny and devastating play.

It’s refreshing to see how well Cooper, Monkhouse and Morecambe get on, rather than the antagonism bordering on cliché that we tend to get in bio-dramas about comedians in theatre or film. Hendy has them gently ribbing each other – particularly about Monkhouse’s big book of carefully pre-prepared jokes – but affectionately, and out of love for what they do. And we get a lot about the history of British comedy through the trio’s reminiscences about who they’ve worked with and admired. It’s often pretty illuminating, even if Hendy plays it safe by steering clear of really addressing the sexism, homophobia and racism underlying the period on which he’s focused.

This is an infuriating play. It’s packed with plot contrivances that see it spinning its wheels to audience patience-testing effect, in service of a final-act reveal. As Irene once again fails to exit the apartment for seemingly no good reason, you want to shout: “Why don’t you just leave?” Wohl’s constant withholding of information results in a strained, artificial tone. In spite of Linton’s directorial scaffolding, the writing isn’t strong enough to make us invest in these characters before we get to the genuinely moving point of the story.

This particular show also benefits from director-of-musicals extraordinaire Greenberg’s in-depth familiarity with it, having previously directed a critically acclaimed U.S. revival in 2005. Crucially, he understands that romance is only one strand of the story and that perhaps the most important ‘character’ is the village itself. That’s where this production truly rises to the occasion. From the staging – which sits us on either side of designer Paul Farnsworth’s rustic French fantasia – to the way some scenes play out amidst us, we’re always brought up close to the supporting characters.

Where this show unambiguously succeeds is in its sympathetic but clear-sighted depiction of a family buckling under buried grief and an impossible present. Brian Yorkey’s book presents us with clearly-drawn portraits of how people respond differently to trauma. There’s a deftly handled and meaty exploration of how little Western society is prepared to truly face loss, our unwillingness to let go of relationships and the risk of unaddressed, harmful patterns of behaviour becoming a family legacy. As Kitt’s attention-grabbing score and Yorkey’s lyrics wheel through differing genres, we get an aural sense of the characters’ messy kaleidoscope of feelings. Longhurst also sharpens the show’s welcome black humour in its bleakest moments with his vivid staging.

There's something gleefully subversive about Dos Santos’s script and Grandage’s bouncy production, which makes it compelling. It’s harder-edged than the simple, ‘joyful comedy’ about an odd-couple friendship that it’s promoted as in the accompanying blurb. Sure, at one level, it does what you might expect from the glut of royal rehabilitation stories we’ve seen on TV and film. It has some great one-liners, gives us a roll call of colourfully eccentric or over-privileged people to laugh at… and there are actual corgis.

Loose-limbed and lumbering, O'Dowd is a revelation as Lennie - a giant of a man left childlike and painfully innocent by a head injury suffered in his youth. As Lennie faithfully repeats and then immediately forgets George's instructions before they reach their latest ranch, O'Dowd neither patronises nor makes light of the character. His American accent is pretty good, too. O'Dowd slides more easily into Steinbeck's rhythm than Franco, who crackles with intensity in some scenes but who initially gives a strained, over-exerted performance. It isn't until the pair settle at the ranch that the tangled knot of emotions binding them together feels real.

The show has you in the palm of its hand with the sharp observational comedy of its opening scenes and Judith Ivey’s hilarious turn as merry aunt Lavinia. And then it clenches its fist. Bone-dry one-liners calcify into a chilling portrait of parental expectations devoid of human warmth in a society where affection is inseparable from fortune.