Not killing me with laughter like the original

'The Ladykillers'

IT was a classic film, then it was another, not-at-all classic film. Then it turned into a semi-hit stage comedy - the last of which is the current, end-of-season offering from the Coliseum.

Realising that recreating the dark, mocking and rather slow pace of the Ealing movie on stage would be a bit dull, writer Graham Linehan - of Father Ted fame - turns the story more towards farce, which offers far more scope for modern stage comedy.

So it proves here, with the quiet but creepy gentility of the original overwhelmed by verbal and physical fun on the three-level set and by comic business involving scarves, blackboards and even railway signals.

Central to all this, of course, you need a team of actors who can convey the manic energy of Linehan's more obviously comic caricatures (they are to the original what Father Ted was to religion), without going too far.

With funny business, funny characters and a wonderfully silly premise - master criminals are defeated almost unwittingly by a little old lady - Kevin Shaw's production should be hilarious and, indeed, it sometimes is.

But at the moment - I saw Saturday's performance - the comedy still seems to be working in. The set-ups are a little clumsy; the pace overall a little slow and deliberate, and some of the business is too much, without being very funny. There's a scarf routine that gets tedious very quickly, for example.

I was also disappointed by the apparently hideous parrot. It's not funny unless it takes a part in the general scheme of things. This one is just a hidden parrot...

The acting is still working in, too. I liked Simeon Truby as the policeman and as a rather Agnes Brown-like friend of Mrs Wilberforce. And Christopher Wright as the major is always good value - I think mainly because he really believes he is his character, whereas some of the others appear simply to be playing silly characters.

Having said that, all of them, from the not quite sufficiently sinister Professor Marcus of Chris Hannon to the monosyllabic Mr Lawson (Howard Gray) and the rather underwritten Harry (Henry Devas) and Louis (Matthew Ganley), will get better as the pace picks up.

The one exception is, perhaps, the Mrs Wilberforce of Roberta Kerr. She's already engagingly oblivious to the danger around her.

PG