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Clever Dick is a right old blast
CLEVER DICK
Hampstead Theatre
HAMPSTEAD Theatre continues its pillage of 20th-century history with a sharp-scripted farce based around the Manhattan Project.
It is June 1945, a month before scientists detonated the first atomic bomb in the Alamogordo desert. The great American physicist Richard Feynman (Adrian Rawlins) makes a wrong turn out of Albuquerque and ends up in the last room in the only motel in town.
Confused he assembles a makeshift noose and gets set to swing from the fan. But he is saved from an early exit by a telephone call.
Life takes a turn for the better for Feynman, but before that the wretched New Yorker finds himself entangled in a web of mistaken identity and espionage as Fat Man (Corey Johnson), Little Boy (Jamie King), the young Matilda (Jennifer Higham) and a toad wreak havoc in his room.
I spotted Stephen Mangan, one of the actors from Channel 4’s hit comedy Green Wing at the interval and his presence was quite appropriate.
While Crispin Whittell’s brand of comedy reminded me of the playwright Joe Orton – there are women hiding in cupboards, mistaken identity, gay jibes and black humour – it was also very modern.
Any of the peculiarities from that series would have been quite at home in Crispin Whittell’s script.
Like all great comedies, Clever Dick has devastating individual trauma lurking beneath its silly surface.
I must admit to being a little confused at first. The programme notes, thick with fact and light on fiction, did not really explain how or why the writer had come to devise this “entirely imaginary” plot.
Why Richard Feynman and one of the Hilton hotel dynasty end up in a hotel room together is still a mystery despite a double take of the programme on the bus home.
But no matter. Only a rough understanding of the dark history of McCarthyism or the development of the hydrogen bomb was needed to enjoy the night.
Initially bored, my interest awakened after the interval. And as the circus swelled to breaking point, outbreaks of spontaneous laughter filled the air.
Ever-so-polite audiences will clap at any old performance, but these actors took their final bow to the kind of raised-hand clapping that I regard as meaningful.
After the Hilda debacle that preceded it, Clever Dick looks to have put Hampstead back on track.
Until June 17
020 7722 9301 |
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