The Sword and the Dope – Waterloo East Theatre

Picture: John Driscoll

The Sword and the Dope continues at the Waterloo East Theatre, London until 1 October.

Star rating: one star ★ ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩

The joke about expecting to get terrible reviews because “it’s in this show’s manifesto isn’t it?” sounds very confident. Sadly, that confidence is woefully misplaced.

Michael Head (who also directs) has reworked his former versions of The Sword and the Dope to produce a very weak political satire, mostly about Brexit and evil Conservative politicians.

Set in Arthur’s England – a stale concept anyway because Spamalot does it rather better – it feels like ‘Horrible Histories Gone Wrong’ and falls flat on its face.

Many of the jokes would be a weary disgrace even in pantomime: “Have you got one of those three-pronged things?”/“No, I told you I won’t invest in Trident” is fairly typical, although often the dialogue is gabbled so fast that you can’t hear it anyway.

And the puns are dire and unoriginal. The over-reliance on the word “fuck” used incongruously for laughs is tedious, and suggests lazy scripting too. It isn’t an innately funny word although, on press night, the audience helpfully tittered every single time it was uttered. Mildly amusing the first time, but the joke has worn off by the twentieth.

There are songs but several members of the unamplified cast, many with thin voices, struggle to sing their unmemorable numbers against a backing tape which is too loud and carelessly synched.

There is also much cavorting about Waterloo East’s tiny stage with clichéd school play-like choreography. Only twice in the show does the music come to life: once when Allan Scott-Douglas accompanies a relatively witty number on guitar, and again when Niall Thorpe does some manic recorder playing and actually managed to make me laugh.

All this is a great pity because amongst the awfulness there is real talent in the 13-strong cast and it’s trying very hard to burst out.

Affton Fay, for example, delights as the short-sighted prophet and drunken Wizard Merlot with bowed legs and screwed-up face.

Dalton Wood creates something reasonably charismatic in a narcissistic panto prince sort of way out of the Black Knight, and Dan Cavendish (in his professional debut) makes an accomplished attempt of a simpering gay man and a cod-Frenchman, among other roles.

It gives me little pleasure to write a review like this – I arrived at the theatre expecting a cheerful, laugher-filled evening and was very disappointed.

Susan Elkin

www.waterlooeast.ticketsolve.com