Myra Dubois Be Well. Peacock Theatre.

Fresh from a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe, writer, actor, and stand-up performer Gareth Joyner brings his two gloriously fashioned comic characters Frank Lavender and Myra Dubois to London’s Peacock Theatre.

Lavender, a kind of Sir Les Patterson to DuBois’ Dame Edna, is one of those ‘80s northern stand-up comedians who really should have been cancelled by now. Self-declared “last straight man in show business” and best friend of Chubby Brown, he has been on a recent diversity training course to awaken his sense of inclusivity. “Homosexuals are one people we should never turn our backs on”, he tells us, which suggests he may well have missed the point. Still, he managed to snag this year’s award for sixth best joke at the Fringe (“How do coeliac Germans greet each other? Gluten tag”). Son of the infamous music hall act ‘Fatty Lavender’, comedy runs through Frank “like an uncooked chicken”. He is, he proudly tells us, the “only comedian who can elicit survivors guilt”.

Part of what makes Joyner’s comic creations so appealing is how richly textured they are. Lavender, red-faced and boasting Elvis Presley-style sideburns, clad in a black and white sequined suit, walks with a kind of shuffle that reminds one of TV’s Hercule Poirot, or the Penguin from numerous Batman movies. His wife Rose, a “bespectacled cherub” also known as the “Venus de Rotherham”, accompanies Frank’s sing-along version of Let Me Entertain You sing on snare drum and cymbals. She cannot quite manage to drum out his punchlines correctly, but so bad are his jokes it rarely matters. Determined to prove his comedic worth Lavender gets a helper from the audience to note down how many laughs he gets on a whiteboard. “Lie next time” he tells the unfortunate accomplice when they admit to being an accountant, then relents with “I’m not saying 2008 was all on you”.

The show’s much longer second half belongs to the acid-tongued siren of South Yorkshire, drag creation Myra DuBois. DuBois is not merely a “low-placing semi-finalist on the 14th season of Britain’s Got Talent”, but one of the UK’s leading specialists in “projectile mindfulness”. Celebrating ten years since she started drinking again, Myra, who is a kind of grotesque mash-up of Nadine Dorries, Adele, and Lily Savage, has quit showbusiness. Her inner consciousness tells her she now has a higher specialism, which is to divine exactly wrong with everyone she sets eyes on and, open-hearted as she is, share her thoughts with her audience. She describes her approach to telling-it-like-it-is as more “shit bruschetta” than “shit sandwich”.

Joyner has a kind of Barry Humphries-like ability to captivate and petrify audiences in equal measure. Bedecked in earrings created from “the carbonised remains of hecklers” she paces the aisles, searchlight in hand, in search of victims to “help and heal”. She tells a conservatively dressed audience member to “stop appropriating lesbian culture”. Of a balding victim she remarks how often “the gays and the far-right share an aesthetic”. “Get over it” she instructs her audience to chant should any of her targets reveal hidden inadequacies.

None of Joyner’s blows are really low and much of his comic writing is very clever indeed. DuBois takes joy in highlighting “some unexpected third-act pathos” and her riff on abstract versus linear narrative in drag composition indicates some heavyweight dramatic thinking. Ditto the shows best joke, which has to do with Chekhov’s laxatives (one never knows when they will go off). Myra Dubois: Be Well will not be to everyone’s taste, it is at least twenty minutes too long, and those who book the front seats do so at their peril. Those gripes aside, this is a remarkable comic tour-de-force.

Writer and Director: Gareth Joyner

This review first appeared in The Reviews Hub