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FringeReview UK 2025

The Double Act

Arcola Theatre, Dalston

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Drama, Theatre

Venue: Arcola Theatre, Studio 1

Festival:


Low Down

“Diversity and seclusion” quips the resident of a cooked-in, grunged-in maisonette living room. Fortune’s certainly been diverse here. And there’s plenty of the latter now for Cliff Biddle, once the hapless straight half of Biddle & Bash, a comedy double act once so big in the ‘80s they slotted in just after Jim’ll Fix It. Those were the days that sound like claxons. Mark Jagasia’s The Double Act directed by Oscar Pearce till February 22nd.

Over 105 minutes with interval, this is the darkest, wittiest comedy playing in London.

This is the darkest, wittiest comedy playing in London.

A masterly comedy, and should be packed out.

Review

“Diversity and seclusion” quips the resident of a cooked-in, grunged-in maisonette living room. Fortune’s certainly been diverse here. And there’s plenty of the latter now for Cliff Biddle, once the hapless straight half of Biddle & Bash, a comedy double act once so big in the ‘80s they slotted in just after Jim’ll Fix It. Those were the days that sound like claxons. Mark Jagasia’s The Double Act directed by Oscar Pearce till February 22nd. This is the darkest, wittiest comedy playing in London.

E route to his last, huge gig of the season, Billy Bash (Nigel Betts) for some reason visits Clifford ‘Cliff’ Biddle (Nigel Cooke), and first meets his upper flat share minder Gulliver (Edward Hogg), a much younger man. Or is ‘meet’ the right word? Gulliver is unnervingly informed about them both.

Indeed, he’s been Cliff’s amanuensis. Which troubles Billy, before Cliff emerges seeking an invisible snake dressed up as Noddy, invoking the old days. For Cliff they’ve been the only days, ever since Billy shot Cliff in the eye with an air-gun forty years ago that night. “Fired… and hit by a Pinochet” as Cliff winces sadly: it ended Cliff’s career before Billy went solo as the “third most offensive comic in Britain”.

Only there’s more that ended Cliff’s career, and some of it might just end Billy’s too. At least Gulliver thinks so. The public who adore him though, go for Billy’s “Brexitcution”, sharing just those chop-head values. The only thing Billy has to worry about is a bad back and “infarction” which comes out as crude oil in Betts’ sovereign skirls: a bass line over Cooke’s magnificently wibbly arias, poised between Roger Irrelevant and Frank Spencer.

Cliff’s morphed from pathetic straight-man to pathetic forgiver of sins. If you start reading the bible, there’s literally an eye for an eye. But smoking Ecclesiastes and half of another Book with Sue Pollard in a hotel room has gentled Cliff’s revenges. But Gullliver’s?

Cliff wheedles over Billy’s talent, even if there’s dark hints of plagiarism. But the balance here, the above lines suggest, gives Cliff the edge. Not that Billy’s blunt instrument lacks weight.  Of Cliff’s flashing habit “So that’s how you get mermaids pregnant”, and others probably not quotable. Admixed with casual misogyny as Cliff, alarmingly well-up on culture wars reminds Billy, whom he apostrophises, again biblically as The Messiah of Mirth. Not that that stops his ex-partner. A female entertainer. dismissed as “paint stripper”, is family-level for Billy. Indeed Cliff laments their family show turned adult with Billy’s solo.

Motives simmer in Sarah Beaton’s set of mushroom-cultured walls, threadbare curtains, and skanky 80s furniture. It’s stabbed with brightness: a bright, framed poster of their double act. It’s strikingly, then often spookily lit by Matt Haskins, and Dan Balfour’s sound doesn’t just belt out period music. The effects, including lightning, seep into northern gothic.

Hogg’s Gulliver, a singular name for someone who’s travelled out of himself, is both reassuringly camp and liminally distant: a man standing at an oblique angle to the old act. Hogg’s both solidly mischievous, and playfully judgmental. When he does judge, he soars with an aria of his own in the second act, where his appearance has altered, ragged with the weight of where he’s been. A range of motives emerge. Jagasia’s options for dolloping out reckonings open up; by the end of the first act you wonder who’s pulling who. Indeed in some ways this might have turned even more guignol.

The one-liners never stop; indeed there’s a feeling Jagasia declines shifting gears to risk spoiling the work by plumbing the pain behind such comedic dark. That slightly limits depth of characterisation and some of the wilder possibilities The Double Act throws up. That might just have turned it into a masterpiece. To compensate, the denouement, both offstage and on, lurches into well – it’s not just the maisonette that’s rickety, as we’ve long been told. And not everything unseen is illusory.

This is still a masterly comedy though, and should be packed out. Forget the suave fare in the West End. As the Arcola increasingly moves all productions in-house there’s a theatrical fire in Dalston that can be seen from Shaftsbury Avenue, and with luck will blaze through the decades.

 

 

Producer Sarah Lawrie, Dramaturg Titania Krimpas, Production Manager Josh Collins, Movement Director Sian Williams, Costume Supervisor Katherine Watt,

Stage Manager James Christensen, ASM Emily Hawkins, Cover artist & solo portraits Charlie Flint, Rehearsal and Production Photography Alex Brenner

Published