The Upstart Crow, Gielgud Theatre review: A deliriously silly adaptation of the acclaimed sitcom

Ben Elton’s TV smash has traded the safety of the small screen for the slings and arrows of the stage

Very skilled and attractive: David Mitchell stars in the play (Johan Persson)

★★★★☆

“Comedy, love – and a bit with a dog. That’s what they want,” declares Thomas Henslowe, the debt-ridden theatre manager in Shakespeare in Love. The Tom Stoppard-scripted movie made a blissfully talented transfer to theatre (the natural home of the material) half a decade ago. Now just as Stoppard returns to the West End with his masterpiece Leopoldstadt, without larky Shakespearean scaffolding up pops The Upstart Crow. Ben Elton’s critically acclaimed Bard-centred sitcom has forsaken the relative safety of the small screen in order to expose itself to the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune that is live performance.

The canine in Shakespeare in Love was an adorable Labradoodle called Spot. The Upstart Crow may draw on dog front. But it includes a bear, who comes in handy for gags about the difficulty of realising some of Shakespeare’s stage directions, supremely “Exit, pursued by a bear” in The Winter’s Tale. This creature has been rescued from the cruelties of a Bear Garden by the Bard’s female sidekick (played with heavenly feel for the show’s humour by Gemma Whelan). An anachronistically advanced interest in our current preoccupations – animal rights, diversity, representation – is the running gag in a show that is notionally set in a period where it was illegal for a woman to play anything on a stage. And then, of course, there are immemorial, time-honoured jokes about show business.

Will the Rabbit, having worked in the entertainment sector, be able to cope with the wild? “What’s he going to do when he meets his first wolf pack – tell them a dull anecdote?” Fans of jokes about willies or killjoy puritans will certainly not go home empty-handed. It’s not his legs but his giant penis that gets tricked into modelling yellow cross-gartered wear in this show’s depiction of a real-life prototype of Twelfth Night’s Malvolio.

In the central role, David Mitchell does a very skilled and attractive job playing with the comic mismatch between the idea of Shakespeare as a transcendent genius and his own persona as an impatient, grumpy permanent undergrad.

The version of the Bard that Mitchell has chosen to play would, you feel, be more likely to have written Getting Back to Gluten: a Downbeat Treasury of One-Ring Recipes for Stressed Singletons than Hamlet. At the same time, with the identical twins from Twelfth Night playing a couple of Coptic Christians from Egypt, the show careers into a scenario where the Bard wonders whether the world is ready for a ménage à trois with three cross-dressing heretics. Is it now, for that matter?

Fast, often escalating into delirious silliness, Upstart Crow must be deemed a hit, a hit, an implausible hit.

Until 25 April. Tickets: 0844 482 5151; upstartcrowthecomedy.com