Review: INSIDE NO.9 STAGE/FRIGHT, Wyndham's Theatre

At its worst Inside No.9 Stage/Fright plays out like a greatest hits album. Familiar rhythms rewired into a thank you for the fans, who no doubt will vibrate with delight at some of the references to old episodes. Not much of a criticism when the endlessly inventive original is so salute-worthily brilliant.

Fans of Inside No.9 know the rules: macabre menace, a brass rabbit, a blindsiding twist. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s darkly comic cocktail of silliness and horror won them nine series with a devoted cult following. Can a stage adaption live up to the hype or is the West End reheating more artistic leftovers?

West End theatres are bristling with ghosts, and a particularly vengeful spirit is haunting Wyndham’s. The anthology format is replicated from the series with colliding narratives, each a different genre, tumbling, like theatrical dominos; the poltergeist neatly pins it together in an expectedly unexpected sort of way.

But take apart each fragment and you can see all the moving mechanisms borrowed from Shearsmith and Pemberton’s artistic inspirations – homages to Hammer House horror, variety show double acts and light entertainment performances now doomed to fade in memories of yesteryear. Most of the first act is a bulked-out version of the series 4 episode Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room, a melancholic reunion of an aging comedy duo for one last hurrah. One is saddled with retro nostalgia for the old days, the other has moved on to a corporate world.

Shearsmith and Pemberton are on fine form charging it with sparky wattage, fully flexing their elastic range by embracing the kitschy costumes, set changes, and slapstick dynamics of comedy double acts. Director Simon Evans deftly counterbalances the comedy with buttock clenching tension – the tricksy live camera work conjures the jittery haphazardness of a found footage flick.

For all the deserved fuss over the Hitchcockian thrills and grand guignol gruesomeness, the best episodes Inside No.9 were always weighted by heavy humanity, characters yearning for life or mourning death. There’s a whisper of that here: “What is a ghost but a memory?” ponders Pemberton in the fourth wall breaking prologue. But emotional depth is pushed to the back of the queue behind a breathless slew of silly one liners, visual gags galore, the occasion luvvie-baiting jab at the theatre world, and the improvised celebrity cameo which changes each performance.

You never know what genre an episode of Inside No.9 will deliver. Cramming all possibilities together, it’s little surprise that some of it will be crowded out. But the show is sold out. Inside No.9 diehards won't care. 

Inside No.9 Stage/Fight plays at Wyndham's Theatre until April 9

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