REVIEW: The Lying Kind @ The Tron Theatre
★★☆☆☆
When works such as Fawlty Towers and The Play that Goes Wrong set a strong and exciting precedent for farce, managing to live up to such a standard is tough enough as it is. So when hearing that Anthony Neilson, known for a love of grit and disturbance, had written his own black farce, I expected I’d be in for a treat.
The Lying Kind follows two police officers, Blunt and Gobbel, over the course of one Christmas Eve as they attempt to deliver some terrible news to an elderly couple - encountering an apparent cross-dressing vicar, a paedophile hunting mum and a Chihuahua along the way.
Having seen Neilsen’s Unreachable at the Royal Court last year, I was preparing myself for something edgy, dark and witty, yet what followed barely came close.
The classic stock characters, though entertaining enough, were a little too confined to being just that. They didn’t particularly develop or stretch and instead lacked the unpredictability and “authenticity” that’s often so endearingly hilarious about such characters. Nonetheless, Martin McCormick and Michael Dylan presented a decent double act with believable chemistry and charisma, with Gavin Jon Wright’s portrayal of Reverend Shandy also being an enjoyable performance. They seemed to have fun on stage as a cast, it just didn’t seem to transfer onto the audience. One of the better moments of physical comedy came when the two policemen struggle to get a body into a cupboard, something which came across genuinely hilarious and admittedly had me laughing out loud. Yet whether or not this was actually a genius moment of choreography, or simply just something that pleasantly surprised me at the time in providing one of the only moments that truly hit the comedic mark is something I’m undecided on.
The charm of a farce tends to come with the ability for events to drag out and avoid a simple conclusion, but to do so in a sharp and snappy way that builds up to a frenetic peak. Yet this production only seemed to deliver on that first part. For a dark comedy, I didn’t find myself feeling like there were any moments of particular cutting darkness, with topics such as paedophilia, death being featured throughout but not so much brought with the conviction that would’ve made given those topics the real depth needed to make an impact. There was so much potential for playing with the balance between light and dark that just wasn’t met.
My overriding thought on the whole production was that I just wanted them do more. To make more of the characters themselves that are, after all, at the core of the performance, to push the moments of comedy and darkness right to the edge and above all to walk the tightrope between the two with a little more risk.
Had I seen this during its better intended Christmas-time run, I think this would have been my saving grace amongst the dreaded panto season, however when placed in early summer when such a wealth of quality theatre is around, for me this production fails to leave its mark.
