Tom, Dick and Harry. Alexandra Palace Theatre.

The Alexandra Palace Theatre’s tribute to the heroes of The Great Escape has lashings of theatrical creativity, wit, and charm, but never quite decides what it wants to be. As a result, it somehow ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts.

28 July 2022 – Press Night

There is a scene set at Christmas mid-way through Tom, Dick and Harry in which the protagonists, a frozen band of mismatched POWs imprisoned in the supposedly escape-proof Stalag Luft III, mull over what they miss about Yuletide festivities at home. One almost expects that, alongside warm beer, farting grannies and family rows, sitting round a TV watching 1960s blockbuster The Great Escape would feature highly. It does not, of course. But the movie, so long a staple of Christmas TV schedules, casts such a long shadow over events in this comedy-drama that the show sometimes struggles to make its own voice heard.

It is almost as if writers Andrew Pollard, Michael Hugo and Theresa Heskins took a look at the movie’s main characters and, having decided they could not be improved upon, just transported them lock, stock, and barrel to the stage. They are mostly all there: posh but wily senior British officer Wings (Andrew Pollard), immaculately coiffured escape genius Ballard (Dominic Thorburn), energetic American tunnel king Landry (Nicholas Richardson), technical genius Bob (Michael Hugo), whose uncanny ability to make anything from a skimmed milk tin provides a neat running joke.

On the German side are nasty Nazi archetype Giesler (a show-stealing comic turn by David Fairs), dumb-but-nice Fritz (Perry Moore), and classy commandant Lederman (in a nice piece of symmetry also played by Andrew Pollard).

For audience-members of a certain age having all these familiar faces on-stage, playing out a predictable story, invokes a warm and fuzzy feeling of gentle recognition. No doubt that is what the writers intended, but it also presents a problem. What do you do with characters who feel every bit as much imprisoned by the tropes of a 60s movie as they are by the walls of a Luftwaffe prison camp?

In the first half the writers’ answer is to pack the show with clever and inventive theatrical tricks, running visual gags, song and dance, and parody that occasionally veers into Allo ‘Allo! territory. The result is a fast-moving, often amusing and periodically very funny way of avoiding the question.

As befits a show that is as much of an homage to a film as it is to real-life heroes, the best of the humour comes in lampooning of some of the movie’s most obviously questionable conceits. Why, for example, would German prison officers speak such dubiously accented English throughout? The answer, of course, lies in a magical translation machine that is switched on and off, to some comic effect, throughout the evening. There are also some great mime moments mocking the complicated logistics of getting in and out of the camp commandant’s office.

The first half is certainly entertaining, but as an exploration of what drove real-life prisoners of war to undertake tremendously risky escapes, or even as an examination of the characters themselves, it lacks bite. The elements never quite come together to give much meaning to the story and the various tunnel-diggers rarely feel, pardon the pun, grounded in anything.  Perhaps an ambition to find something new to say, or to make the characters less archetypal, would have added a little depth.

The more serious and generally more satisfactory second half sees the prisoners’ escape played out in series of highly creative coup de théâtre from director Theresa Heskins. It takes creative skill to make full use of the Alexandra Palace Theatre’s cavernous space and here she pulls off quite a feat, particularly in the Steve McQueen-style bike jump over the wire into neutral Spain.

Towards the end we hear an affecting piece from a real-life survivor of the camp, recalling how the remaining inmates came to hear of their erstwhile comrades’ unfortunate fate. It is almost as if, having seen their characters escape, safely or otherwise, from the environs of the camp, the writers feel comfortable in letting them speak for themselves.

Laura Willstead’s in-the-round camp set makes great use of some excellent top projection and evokes very effectively a feeling of being permanently under watch. All-in-all Tom, Dick and Harry makes for an enjoyable evening. If only it would decide where it wants to go.

Duration: 2 hours 35 mins. One interval.

This Review First Appeared in The Reviews Hub. 29 July 2022

Writers Andrew Pollard, Michael Hugo, Theresa Heskins

Director Theresa Heskins

Set Designer Laura Willstead

Cast

Sam Craig

David Fairs

Andrius Gaučas

Perry Moore

Nicholas Richardson

Dominic Thorburn

Eddy Westbury.