The Comedians at the Bolton Octagon

My friend Anna’s parents have season tickets for the Bolton Octagon. However they are retired, and much like my own parents, appear to spend more time abroad than in the country these days. Therefore they offer Anna and I their tickets, and we took them up on it for the second time on Saturday night. I don’t remember much about the play we saw previously, except that it was boring. The same can’t be said for The Comedians.

The Octagon is a lovely theatre, nice and cosy with a small stage. It was set up as a Manchester classroom from the seventies where six men were attending a stand-up comedy course. Tonight was there big debut at a local club, and the play has three acts: the first is the pre-show class, the second is the show itself, and the third is the post-show analysis back in the classroom.

The first act was actually rather good. I kept thinking how interesting it would be for an actual comedian, as it explored in depth what comedy should be – an opportunity to challenge the audiences’ views and preconceptions and be an instrument of social change, or providing a few cheap laughs on a rainy night for a prejudiced world. Richard Moore beautifully plays Eddie Waters, the tired old-style comic who seeks to instil in his pupils the integrity of comedy.

The second act started rather well too, although it created a strange situation where the audience didn’t seem to know whether they were watching a play or a comedy night. This was made worse when some of the comedians, in order to impress the visiting agent, changed their routines and threw in racist and sexist jokes that no comedian would dignify in the present day. Yet some of the audience laughed, raising the question of how much audiences have really changed in the past 30 years?

The second act ended with a bizarre mime/rant from the most troubled of the comedians, and although it was a powerful performance, it said nothing to me and was embarrassingly dated. A number of the audience left in the second interval, and I hardly blamed them.

I had high hopes for redemption in the third act, but with a low point being a description of an erection caused by the holocaust, I was disappointed. The thing is, I know what the play was trying to do, and I also know that it has been very successful both on Broadway and in a recent all-star London revival. But what I experienced was a cringingly awful performance of a play that might have been progressive when it was first written, but is irrelevant now. It’s a shame; the same themes explored in a modern way could have made an interesting play.