People clearly think Richard Bean is funny. His One Man, Two Guvnors has wowed seemingly everyone from the National to New York since it premiered in 2011, and is still playing to suppositive gales of laughter in the West End. I have to confess, I didn’t find it quite as trouser-soilingly funny as everyone else seems to have, but then I’m happy to concede that that may just be me.
Still, whatever your thoughts on One Man, Two Guvnors, it’s clear from the outset that Smack Family Robinson (written 10 years ago) isn’t quite the play that that is. It’s passable, certainly; it’s well-paced, smoothly directed and very neatly performed, but a riot of frenetic laughter it aint.
The eponymous Robinsons are your typical upwardly-mobile suburban family, except of course they’re all drug dealers, and they clean their ill-gotten profits by laundering everything through a high-street florist. “Whoever heard of a florists,” muses middle-son, Sean, in a moment of clarity, “that has a turnover of £3m?” Changes to the family’s business model are no-doubt afoot.
Head of the family is Gavin (Keith Allen), an erstwhile guitar roadie turned suburban drugs kingpin who, now he’s entering the twilight of his years, has newly-retired from the drugs racket and plans to get into the buy-to-let property racket.
Then comes matriarch Catherine (played several inches above the hilt by Denise Welch), and eldest son Robert (Matthew Wilson), a hulking, slow-witted, well-meaning stock-idiot, used by the others as a driver and debt-collector. Completing the picture are the youngest two siblings, the aforementioned Sean (Harry Melling), who is in the process of taking over the family business, albeit with a clearer, colder eye than his father; and daughter Cara (Kate Lamb), desperate to get away from the family shenanigans by trying to finish a course at catering college. Once the local copper starts sniffing around, one presumes, all hilarity is set to ensue.
The problem with Smack Family Robinson though, is that there is no sense of cohesiveness to the play that follows. There’s no tonal unity to the script: one minute its whip-cracking blackly comic lines about selling flowers to the newly-bereaved parents of teenagers the family have killed with their drugs, and the next it’s trotting out cheapish, pantomime gags about how comparatively terrible Kingston’s surrounding boroughs are. The play originally premiered in Newcastle in 2003 and the Robinsons lived in Whitley Bay, but for this production at the Rose Theatre, the script’s been dusted-down, tarted-up and booted down to Surrey for the amusement of the locals, presumably on the understanding that if you go to Kingston and tell them that Norbiton is a shithole, everybody will wet themselves. Well, it didn’t quite work out like that.
Too frequently characterisation falls foul to gags – which wouldn’t necessarily be that bad if a) it really delivered on laughs and b) when things get a little sticky towards the end you weren’t required to feel anything for the characters. As a result, everything feels somewhat half-achieved.
Half-achieved also is the stance of the play – or perhaps the production – on the morality of drug use. The programme included an article written by Simon Jenkins calling for the decriminalisation of drugs. But it didn’t feel to me like the play was making that point at all. Decriminalisation was referenced, and repeatedly, but the overall aspect of the play was far more concerned with saying “it’s okay to sell drugs if you’re a reasonably affable old rocker, it’s encroaching foreign malevolence that has soured the pot.”
Case in point: at the close of the first half, Gavin screams at the audience: “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” referencing the forgotten 60s idyll: “It was supposed to be about love!” And I sort of thought: “Are you joking?” Is this really how you’re capping off the first half? It wasn’t about love, it was about drugs, even in the 60s; how can you let him get away with that? But away with it he got.
Still, Smack Family Robinson is not a failure, the performances are strong enough, and there is a nice smattering of clever lines flecked throughout here and there. However, with scenes of hard drug use and a good dose of colourful language all oddly caught up in such a parochial, essentially middle-aged sensibility, I can’t see who the play is meant to appeal to.
Richard Bean’s iron is most definitely hot at the moment, so can see why the choice was made to revive one of the back catalogue, I’m just not convinced this was the right one to resuscitate.
