Feargus Woods Dunlop’s spoof detective comedy Houdini’s Great Escape sees the famous escapologist and wife Bess on a pre-first world war visit to England in preparation for a Royal Command Performance.  Plot shenanigans soon see them on the run from the police, framed for a cracking a safe and stealing, amongst other things, Ronnie Barker’s glasses. On the duo’s trail are vengeance-seeking crime matriarch Ma Barker and her gun-twirling son Frank, whose key skills he tells us are “thinking, robbing, and shooting”.

The couple turn detective, join a traveling circus, encounter a buffed-up Yorkshire huntsman with the nous of Sherlock Holmes and the nose of a bloodhound, and conspire to expose a sham medium. “It’s not over yet” Bess (Lydia Piechowiak) tells her husband Harry (Ben Higgins) as the pursuing cops and robbers draw close. You may find yourself wishing it was. Can the master escaper dodge from his toughest challenge yet?  Getting out of the King’s Head Theatre’s confined seating is a task of escapology in itself, and quite possibly the principle thing you will note about this evening. One guesses the vibe Woods Dunlop is aiming for here is The 39 Steps, but Houdini’s Great Escape mostly misfires.

Higgins and Piechowiak shout their way manically through 70 minutes (it feels longer) of a joke-starved, groan-inducing, and mostly bonkers plot. One suspects they have been directed to give the piece a bit of gusto by playing it at maximum volume and warp speed. Perhaps they simply want to get home as urgently as the rest of us. Rattling along at such a pace means the punchlines, sporadic as they are, are mostly missed. It ought not need to be said but Scottish accents are, in and off themselves, not sufficiently comic to sustain a 4-minute skit early on in the show. “Can you dance?” a character is asked. “I can but I cannae can-can”. Oh dear.

At least ensemble performers Kirsty Cox and Adam Elliott seem to be enjoying themselves. Cox channels Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati into the fraudulent medium Agathe and makes for an amusing Nelly the circus elephant, together with her accompanying zookeeper. Elliot’s cameos include Harry’s scamster brother Theodore, a drunken police constable with a revolving wig, and that sharp nosed, broad Yorkshire huntsman. Anticipate fake moustaches, mistaken identities, and secret gang hideouts. Woods Dunlop throws in some tame magic tricks and box-escaping into the mix for good measure.

Writer:  Feargus Woods Dunlop

Director:  Feargus Woods Dunlop

Houdini’s Greatest Escape – King’s Head Theatre

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