The Comeback review, Noel Coward Theatre: A winningly meta comedy caper

“Big fleas have little fleas/ Upon their backs to bite ’em/ And lesser fleas have ‘meta’ fleas/ And so ad infinitum.”

Or to put it in plain prose: there’s no end to the manufacture of plays that fool around, self-reflexively, with theatrical conventions. The Right Size (aka Sean Foley and Hamish McColl) kicked off the most recent craze for this kind of thing with The Play What I Wrote (2001), their affectionate meta-tribute show to Morecambe and Wise. The show spawned a subgenre. Even fans of that genre would have conceded that it might be a short step from The Play That Goes Wrong (2012) to, at least hypothetically, The Play That Went Silly and Self-Indulgent.

So it is a considerable pleasure to report that The Comeback – the first show by Sonia Friedman Productions to open in the West End since the pandemic struck and this sector had to go into the frustrations of lockdown – could be subtitled “The Play That Got It, Pretty Much, Spot On”, such is the dizzying adroitness of its meta-theatrical capers.  

They have had four series of their critically lauded show The Pin on Radio 4, and their Lockdown Zoom sketches have notched up 6 million viewers, but I’m ashamed to say that I have never previously seen Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen, the duo who wrote and now perform in The Comeback. Our duo appear as Ben and Alex, lightly fictionalised versions of themselves. They are playing an engagement in the back of beyond as the warm-up act for Jim and Sid (also impersonated by Ben and Alex), a pair of doddery old comics whose heyday – at places such as the Palladium and in cities such as Minsk (a tour booking that went wrong) – was in the Seventies. Each pair is using the other as a way of trying to park a foot back on the ladder of professional success. They are differentiated chromatically: blue plays against red in their spangly stage-attire. The witty wardrobe and cleverly minimal set are by Rosanna Vize.

The pair have an immediately winning stage presence and chemistry. Alex (the fair-haired one) looks as a newly hatched dabchick might look after it had done a degree at Cambridge. Ben (the dark, bearded, bespectacled one) is ostensibly brainier and has eyes that can become like black tunnels. With real freshness and agile ingenuity, the pair up the ante on the perception that a comedy double act is a metaphor for the gains and losses of codependency. You can neither live with, or live without, the person to whom you are professionally welded.

Before the meta-interval, Ben and Alex engage in cross-talk about how their sketches have been going down on their regional tour. “You wrote it!” protests Ben when Alex screws up a sketch about a swimming instructor who reveals to his pupil that he’s a ghost. “I did, and I’m very proud of it!” exclaims Alex, who evidently does not understand his own punch. The scarlet front-curtain allows the show to nip between the backstage area and the wings of the performance, which we deduce is failing to electrify the public on the other side.

For me, the older pair never come into fully developed historical focus. But Emily Burns directs the proceedings with a real instinct for the balletic comedy of the slapstick and the almost filigree finesse with which the show escalates into frantic mayhem. A farcical accident with a tray concusses Jim, and Ben is forced to step fraudulently into the breach. A crisis of identity, costumes and props ensues. The skill of the performers distracts one from any illogicalities in the situation.

Directly after the socially distanced and delightedly received performance on Tuesday evening of this week, the show had to go into abeyance until London is back out of its newly imposed tier 3 restrictions. But you would not have to be an incurable optimist to book for the resumption of its run.

The Comeback will come back to the Noel Coward Theatre in 2021: of that we can be sure.