Some Good Stuff, But Rather a Lot of Spam

Last week was theatre week at the Bunker – by sheer coincidence of scheduling we ended up seeing the Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Sinhali, Marathi, Sinhala and English production of Midsummer Night’s Dream (brilliant, dark, beautiful), “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” (Pierr Breau’s latest one man show – a bit too ambitious, but an impressive performance) and “Spamalot”, certainly the most expensive ticket of the week. And oddly, the weakest of the three.

“Spamalot” is basically a Monty Python Revue, a series of greatest hits (many culled from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail’). It wasn’t really a musical , but rather an evening of Python-flavoured vaudeville. Great fun, but not great theatre.

As our distinguished bunker readers know, MPFC had its origins in British onstage sketch comedy (Oxford and Cambridge revues, Beyond the Fringe, and so on.) The original TV series took that tradition and rejigged it for television, using BBC production styles as both a format to hang content on, and a topic of satire (as you recall, an awful lot of early Python was actually about the BBC, with dozens of skits based on studio interviews, game shows, man on the street interviews, newscasts, etc.) After their first season, they found their unique rhythm and style, and began to rely less on the TV format as subject matter.

Their first film had the same awkwardness in making the jump from TV to film; it was not much more than an extended episode of the TV series, featuring many of the same skits. With “Holy Grail”, they introduced a film-length narrative strand, a focus that yielded their first successful film. Life of Brian used an even stronger narrative, and worked equally well. They dropped that approach for “Meaning of Life”, and the result was (in my opinion) their weakest film yet – unfocused, self-conscious, and not very funny.

Eric Idle has cheerfully acknowledged that Spamalot was an attempt to squeeze bit more money out of recycled Python, and behind the self-deprecation, that’s probably largely true. Some of the material (“beautiful plumage”) originated on TV, has appeared on album, resurfaced on film, popped up in their live shows, been reissued in the films of those live shows, and is now back for a final bow in Spamalot. The Python insiders (who probably make up about half the audience) cackled at each familiar line, as I did myself. The problem is, those lines are no longer funny because of they’re part of a clever skit. They’re funny because we remember they were funny once. It’s like the wave of undeserved canned applause that greets the arrival of a sitcom hero – they’re not doing anything funny, they’re just there.

Some of the recycled material, presented intact onstage, works just fine – the “Make Sure The Prince Doesn’t Leave The Room” remains funny, probably because it’s presented intact, and because it was essentially a stage sketch to start with. But other scenes (the Knights Who Say “Ni”), which were conceived for film or TV, don’t work as well.

On that note, it’s encouraging that much of the new material, which was written specifically for the stage, is pretty good. My favourite was a lengthy spoof of “Fiddler on the Roof”, “You Won’t Succeed On Broadway Without More Jews”. That suggests that if Eric Idle and company can wean themselves from their dependence on tried and true material from the Python Archive, there might yet be a funny musical waiting to happen.

In other words – they’re not quite dead yet.