Directed by Edward Hall
I wondered if this play labours under a couple of misapprehensions. The first is that the business of comedy or backstage stories about comedy are themselves funny. It is more normal to depict the opposite as true, those cliches of the unhappy clown or the comedy duos or troupe that hate one another's guts. In this case the writer wrings quite a few jokes out of this fictionalised tale of a law suit brought by the members of the Monty Python troupe against the US ABC network over cuts made to a 1975 broadcast of the fourth series.
The problem here is, possibly, that
because it's based on Monty Python we expect it to be a lot funnier
than it actually is. An interview with the author in the programme
seems to suggest that play started life as a quite serious almost
documentary piece and he had to work to inject humour into it (he's rather pleased with putting his Terry Gilliam character in silly costumes). As
I've said I think it succeeded in being funny – Matthew Marsh's
judge, presiding over the case, was particularly good – but
something made me want more and made me sensitive to occasional the
dips in action or when humorous lines misfired.
I found the fictionalisation of the
piece bothered me quite a lot. It wasn't just being told in overlong
voice-overs at the beginning of each act, that the play was fictional
that grated. It was more that I kept wondering just how much was
fiction. I was prepared to allow it all to be fiction but I knew that
the author had studied Michael Palin's diaries for the period and had
to wonder if some of the seemingly un-Palin-like schoolboy outbursts
from Harry Hadden-Paton's Michael were based on reality or
ill-rendered imagination.
I also had a problem with the play
failing to mention the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail which was
released before the play was set and did reasonably well at the time.
Maybe it didn't fit in with the author's desire to suggest that 1975
was a time when the Pythons were facing up to the fact that they had
broken up and that some were facing uncertain futures. Of course
crying “fiction” can cover this but I found it jarring.
I thought the other possible
misapprehension in this play was the idea that this is “still an
ostensibly Python-worshipping country”*. We are told by the media
and comedy nerds that we should revere Monty Python, the troupe, the
movies and the TV series. I am enough of a comedy nerd to be quite
happy to do that but I'm not sure how many other people could say the
same.
In the 40 years since Python was first
broadcast in the UK it has been repeated about 3 times on terrestrial
television (BBCs 1 or 2). I was too young to see the original series
and did't catch it until it was repeated in the late 80s - I think
it has been repeated once since then. It has been played quite a lot
on satellite and cable channels over the years but not recently.
Copyright disputes meant that the videos of the series disappeared
from shelves in the mid-90s and the DVDs of the full series were not
available in the UK until 2007.
My point here is that in spite of being
told by the media that Python is important and main-stream, the
reality is that the series hasn't been watched that often and might be
completely unfamiliar to people seeing this play. It means that
nuances might be lost on them and the play doesn't explain why we
should care that the series was funny
I would love to feel that everybody
could tune in somewhere to see an episode every night but it has
never really been the case here and that's a pity.
*This comes from an excellent Not the
Nine O'Clock News sketch about the Life of Brian controversy and you
might not have seen that either.