Review: THE LAST LAUGH, Tabard Theatre

We're in one of those dingy offices beloved by governments the world over (you can almost smell the stuffiness) with a young bloke, all bubbly enthusiasm, and an older man, uniformed, face as slabbily stiff as an Easter Island statue.

Noises off speak to a war not far away. We might be in the Caucasus or the Balkans a few years ago, or Ukraine now. The younger man is there to get his play, a comic reworking of Romeo and Juliet, approved for production; the older man is there because he can no longer fight due to injury. He has never visited a theatre in his life.

Richard Harris's 2007 play (based on Kōki Mitani's Warai no Daigaku, a somewhat unlikely source) is a classic comedy set up - trap two very different people, stir in a little conflict, light the blue touch paper and retreat. What emerges has its fair share of laughs, indeed the most I've heard in any theatre this year, but there's a fair bit going on beyond the bickering.

Matt Wake, a 2021 graduate whose education must have been hampered by Covid, is splendid as The Writer, initially attempting to bluff his way past the military man's objections, then turning on the charm, ultimately standing his ground. David Tarkenter just dazzles as The Censor, deadpan in delivery, somehow resisting the temptation to corpse at some outrageous lines and, in the second half, brilliantly lending nuance and poignancy to the soldier without ever selling out the brutal worldview that has led him to where he is today.

You can simply take your pick of an abundance of Easter eggs included for our delectation. I caught a nod towards One Foot In The Grave and The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin and delighted in a censored script that was veering off towards The Play That Goes Wrong territory. None of this is made obvious - like all the best comedy, we're doing half the work ourselves.

But there's deeper stuff too; a complicated bromance and dependency between the men circling each other that had me thinking of Steptoe and Son and a political bite sharper and more subtle than that conjured by the vast majority of satirists working today. The men explore the construction and purpose of comedy, especially in times of crisis, illustrating the paradox that analysing a joke kills it, but must be done in order to write and deliver them. The limits of comedy are also patrolled, a subject alive on the Right and Left of the political spectrum, alongside the division of labour between a producer and a director. The metas just keep coming - and, praise be, the word "woke" is entirely absent.

But this revival, opening the Tabard Theatre under its revived name and new management, never loses track of its obligation to entertain and, after the laughter has died down, to educate too. A new era could hardly have got off to a better start.

The Last Laugh is at the Tabard Theatre until 3 December

Photo Credit: Andreas Grieger