Interview: The Penny Dreadfuls

There are only so many nefarious moustaches you can twizzle; only so many megalomaniacal anarchists with fizzing bombs you can run to ground; only so many public school bully boys you can chase pell-mell around the empire.

So, the effortlessly witty Penny Dreadfuls, direct descendants of The Goons, have (temporarily) hung up their top hats and and frock coats and decided to embrace that most slippery of customers - modern, urban life.

When I spoke to David Reed, they were "tweaking the script" of their new show ahead of its world premiere at Greenwich. After that, they head off to their "spiritual home" of Edinburgh - a routine they followed in 2008 with the acclaimed Aeneas Faversham Forever.

The award-winning Penny Dreadfuls comprising David, Humphrey Ker and Thom Tuck started together in Edinburgh in 2002 with university troupe the Improverts and began touring with their own brand of Victorian comedy thrillers in 2005, garnering wider acclaim on stage and, later, on radio.

So why the switch from the twisted take on historical revisionism that provided them with their name and their huge following?

"It felt like time," said David. "We'd done three years of Victorian and it felt like we should change things. We'd love to go back to the Victorian one day but we thought why not try something brand new and stretch our wings.

"We're still fairly young and we didn't want to get stuck with the idea that we only ever did historical comedy in one very small bracket of time.

"Everything in the Victorian era was melodramatic and large and we wanted to try find more intimate characters by starting at an urban and contemporary starting point and growing them from grass roots."

And to jolt them into this new world, they've taken two other major creative decisions - to return to the sketch format; and to bring in a director to discipline their comedy.

"We hadn't devised any kind of style - we did what seemed to work - and it meant that we very rarely directed each other; we would just write and write and largely do improv performances. So we thought bringing in a director would give us avenues we wouldn't normally explore, maybe because they were outside our comfort zone."

So it must have been a daunting leap into the unknown?

"It was a learning curve because we hadn't done sketches for two years," said David.

"We were all very excited and we would sit round the table hoping to have something to bring to our director at the first rehearsal and we sat there and thought - 'erm, short ideas; things funny in a short amount of time...'

"But slowly and surely we learnt that it wasn't the kernel of the idea we needed, you just have to start running with anything and you'll find your way."

Despite the departure, The Penny Dreadful's trademark ripping yarn element is still threaded through the new material.

David said: "We haven't totally abandoned the habit of implying an enormous narrative before the sketch began and an enormous amount yet to come. They really are just trailers for epics.

"We're still trying to give it a bit of a world to inhabit because that's something we very much like. Every sketch could inhabit the same world. So this one is all loosely themed - it's night time in an urban environment and we've tried to give it the same palette so you can believe you are travelling from one house to another just down the road."

And what about the fans' reaction?

"It is something we were apprehensive about. It's always frightening when you depart from the thing that people seem to like about you. But we've been doing bits and bobs here and about and the reaction has been very positive."

And don't expect piles of self-flagellating EastEnders-style urban grime and anguish.
"It's set at night but it's not particularly dark. It's all rather surreal and jolly. We intend to make people happy about laugh rather than taking the TV show route - hating everyone and everything.

"People can expect a sketch show from people who have been doing this a while. Experienced people doing something new to them. It's exciting."

- The Penny Dreadfuls, Thursday-Saturday, July 8-10, 8.30pm, £15. Go to greenwichtheatre.org.uk.

Who's who
David said: "We want to makes sure this time that Tom will not play all the women but one by one we say, 'well this scene would work a lot better if Tom played the woman'. Humphrey because he's 6ft 7in will often play megalomaniacal villains in at least one or two sketches and there's me in between, the utility player. Owen Hargreaves."

Influences
David said: "We do write gags which a lot of people don't, we do like to have solid gags as well as character performances - I can see where the Blackadder things comes from - but we absolutely adore the Goon Show, Humphrey and I especially, and Tom's a massive Python as well as Peter Cook, Alexei Sayle, and Vic and Bob and Humphrey loves American comedy... the influences are everywhere. Everything you've ever laughed at has to influence what you're writing."

– From July 2010

Exhibition: Close Examination, National Gallery

If this exhibition were a TV series, it would be CSI (Grissom, not Caine) or maybe a high-end Hustle. If it were a book, it would a Dan Brown re-imagined by Ian McEwan. If it were a film it would be something starring a dashing prof played by James Stewart.

This is art with a magnifying glass, a cryptic clue, an unexplained anachronism and a journey towards the (occasionally very inconvenient) truth; it's classy, accessible and devilishly intriguing.

Not often do the backroom boys and girls with their gadgets and their hunches get to parade their know-how on the walls of the National Gallery.

Here, they do a nifty show and tell introducing visitors to practices such as cross section microscopy, pigment analysis, dendrochronology and infrared reflectography.

Tucked away in the Sainsbury wing, this compact display is like the Black Museum of the Met Police, where the dirty little secrets are aired and slip-ups find a new lease of life as warnings against wishful thinking.

One example of which is Botticelli. The master had only just been re-discovered in the late Victorian era when two works attributed to him came up in auction and were enthusiastically snapped up for the gallery.

An Allegory (in hindsight) is plainly an inferior work to Venus And Mars, lacking the precision, depth and texture. But the former, by an unknown, was bought for £1,627 10s and the latter, now one of the most beloved pictures in the collection, for much less - £1,050.

Oops. But in a good way.

At its heart, this remains a display of paintings as well as a detective's trail. So there are works by Durer, Gossaert, Rembrandt, Raphael.

And, of course, derivatives of the above - whether as fakes, homage, homework, riddles or a rebranding of a non-descript to boost the price tag.

But's not all hoodlum ruses and knock-off Nigels. There's a flipside. Saint Francis Of Assissi With Angels (1475-80), originally attributed to Botticelli pupil Filippino Lippi, on restoration is re-attributed to the master himself.

And the shimmering Madonna Of The Pinks by Raphael (1506-7) - pictured - was copied a dozen or more times. Scientific examination revealed the National Gallery held the original. Spontaneity gave curators a clue.

Save for a few microscopic flecks, the original plum colour of the curtains is lost beneath a new coat of green. The copyists were unaware of the artist's change of heart and applied just the green.

Greatness, restored.

– From July 2010

Book review: The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park

Dammit. The BBC already has a sitcom based in Bletchley Park (Hut 33). I'm no Croft and Perry but the potential for culture clash comedy is immense, judging from Sinclair McKay's rich social history.

The place was a baffling mix of titled "gels", bonkers boffins, eccentrics, ingenues fresh from university and clueless locals crushed together by the immense pressure of the task.

Bletchley Park is legend. Winston Churchill called it the "goose that laid the golden egg and never cackled".

The breakthrough in cracking the German's unfathomable Enigma codes shortened the war by two years and saved thousands of lives. And it was, of course, the birthplace of the computer.

Authors, including Robert Harris, have mined this code-breaking hive for drama and adventure. McKay is more fastidious and factual. He looks at food, lodgings, sex, rows, entertainment, booze and class.

He talks to ordinary workers about how life - a blend of brilliance and boredom - was conducted against a backdrop of high stakes and secrecy.

The Bletchley veterans kept their stories to themselves for decades. But as they pass into history, this illuminating peek at a place hailed as one of the greatest triumphs of the 20th century is a fitting tribute to their fortitude and ingenuity.

– From July 2010

Exhibition: The Deep, Natural History Museum

If we were in any doubt, BP has shown the tissue-thin limit of human capacity; how clumsy and hopeless we are just a few metres away from home.

Clunking robots, blundering oafs with spanners and hamfisted submersibles are the best we can manage.

Meanwhile, in the inky depths (and getting inkier) a legion of Darwin's wonders are going about their business with blissful efficiency.

This new exhibition illuminates why the climate at 10,000m is so harsh and unfriendly to us and how these trials have tested a range of biological templates, forcing upon them correction, adaptation or oblivion.

In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan concluded the sea was bottomless because it proved longer than his piece of string.

Since then, we have been measuring, recalibrating and reappraising the furthest point of this unknown eco-system - less charted than the surface of the moon.

The record is 10, 914m by the Trieste in 1960 but in 1934 William Beebe and Otis Barton became ridiculous contortionsts in their weeny steel marble to record a record depth of 923m.

On a heady mix of life-saving gases they saw biological wonders that were a product less of examination and more of hallucination.

But, drugs and dreamscapes are the perfect catalysts to imagine the creatures displayed here. Even their names seem to come directly from the pages of Harry Potter, or JRR Tolkien - roundnose grenadier, bristlemouth, fangtooth.

Creatures both robust - because of the crushing pressures - and delicate. Adaptations from the realms of the mythical - like bioluminescence (the stoplight loosejaw) or extremism. (The alfonsino has such large doe eyes that turns a seemingly rank and file fish into a Disney heartbreaker).

Oliver Crimmen, Natural History Museum's fish curator, said. "The pressure at the deepest point in the ocean is 10,000 times greater than what life experiences on land. So deep sea fish have bodies designed to withstand these huge pressures.

"Some have paper thin skeletons with soft watery tissue that can't be squashed. Others can fill and empty their air bladders as they move up and down. But if they are bought up too quickly their insides expand and explode out of their soft bodies."

Food is scarce. They feed on each other, dots of bacteria and dead things that float down from the surface - a sperm whale skeleton, on display, provides sustenance for 50 years.

But despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of light, food, warmth and congenial environment, the deep sea is the crucible of life, favouring durability and flexibility that would be eventually hardwired into the DNA of all living things.

By the deep sea vents, super heated water emerges at 300C, unable to boil or steam because of the pressures. Despite the hostility, tube worms, clams and blind white shrimp thrive.

And it was from this brew of heat and chemicals that biologists believe life turned from a string of reactions into a weird molecule capable of self-replication and adaptation.

This exhibition aims to capture that epic drama with a range of specimens in jars and artefacts from historic dives.

Children will love the interactive elements, including a submarine, and the more grotesque creatures, but this is a wordy exhibition and requires some focus to illuminate the gloom.

– From July 2010

Book review: The Twain Maxim, by Clem Chambers

Mark Twain's maxim is as follows: "A mine is a hole in the ground with a fool at the bottom and a crook at the top."

From this tortured beginning, analyst and author Clem Chambers clambers back on to surer ground with a no-holds-barred tale of derring-do, death and diamonds.

He may be of the financial thriller school of novelists but Chambers has another dimension - and several more gears - to his prose.

The story has rogue marketer Baz Mycock milking investors with the tease of mineral wealth in an inaccessible part of Africa.

However, Baz hadn't anticipated that monied whizzkid and adventurer Jim Evans (think Richard Branson but cool) would be so bored with his wealth he'd take a more than active interest in his fledgling investment.

Jim is lured out to the jungle where his life becomes very seriously threatened and he needs his gadgets, wits and friends at their sharpest.

Chambers has a tendency towards the "one leap and he was free" school of plotting (brace yourself for the K9-a-like doombah). However, he cannot be faulted for mashing up a thrilling, page-turner with jeopardy around every corner.

His evocation of Africa - chaos, anarchy, beauty and flies - has a ring of authenticity and he's a useful guide if you have a million to drop.

An exciting ride.

– From June 2010

Stage review: After The Dance, National Theatre

After The Dance was a critical success on its opening, but a commercial failure. Perhaps people had other matters on their minds with the date of the first night - June 1939 - a clue to their preoccupation.

War was just around the corner and, while the young Terence Rattigan was receiving "he's done it again" style notices in the press for his stylish and witty social critique, the German High Command was completing its timetable for Hitler's invasion of Poland.

Stung by the lack of a long run Rattigan deliberately omitted After The Dance from his Collected Plays in 1953 and so the legend of the "lost masterpiece" was born - although it has been revived before.

But never, surely, with the confidence and subtlety of Thea Sharrock's production at the National.

The timing, among a welter of other attributes, is spot on. After The Dance, set in the '30s, is a long lament for the golden days of unfettered indulgence and their imminent suffocation in a cloud of doom. The party's over and hard times are just around the corner.

As George Osborne sets the foundations for a new age of austerity, the sense of hangover and lost opportunity has an eerie relevance.

Joan and David Scott-Fowler married in a whirlwind of merriment in those carefree days of the '20s but now they find themselves entombed in party personas that no longer hold any truth or resonance.

With the shrill arrogance of youth, Helen Banner (a pert Faye Castelow) sets about repairing the drink-damaged David and sets in train a series of calamities that tease the fissures of the fragile Scott-Fowler marriage and ruins her own relationship with the idealistic Peter (John Heffernan).

The ensemble cast, in Hildegard Bechtler's simple but beautiful Mayfair setting, is quietly and effortlessly brilliant. Adrian Scarborough received an extra decibel of applause for his portrayal of parasitic chum John Reid, a court jester able to tell truths through a fug of whisky fumes.

Nancy Carroll's Joan catches the quiet despair of her predicament with a moment of heart-rending stillness amid a bustle of fabricated jollity.

Benedict Cumberbatch is rich, regal and mellifluous as David. He fancies he has another life beyond the shallow bon viveur but slowly discovers his hinterland is not as rich and deep as he had fondly imagined.

Cumberbatch remains haughty and self-absorbed yet still earns sympathy as the wire trap cuts deeper every time he tries to wriggle free.

The cast is served by an impeccable piece of writing. Rattigan understands structure, pacing, revelation and consequence. He places a vase teetering on the mantelpiece and he knows when to pull it back and when to send it crashing to the floor. His setpieces are marvellously understated yet wonderfully cathartic.

The playwright will be celebrated during the centenary of his birth in 2011 and, if this masterclass is an appetiser of what is to come, then there may yet be diamonds in the dust of austerity.

– From June 2010

Exhibition: Rude Britannia, Tate Britain

You wonder if satire is a particularly British accommodation. This jaunty exhibition at Tate Britain is not only packed with Gillrays and Hogarths and Scarfes, the searing sexual satires of Sarah Lucas and the swivel-eyed Spitting Image Maggie but it's also crammed to the gills with so much anger. Shaking, brittle fury. A baton of finger-wagging opprobrium passed from one generation to the next.

And not the anger that has artists firing wildly at canvasses making a crude, splattered attempt at catharsis.

No, this anger - and this is what makes it British - this anger is hidden behind neat smiles and embarrassed British stiffness of lip finding voice in tight, toxic, scalpel sharp depictions of grotesquerie.

As if anger fully expurgated was unseemly, and it was better handled out of sight with a sense of decorum and dismissable silliness.

It was all very passive-aggressive and hoity-toity witty. So much anger, so much repression. It has to come out somewhere. Either in boils or pancreatic disruptions or, here, with four centuries of cartoons and satires and biting caricatures creating an army of the unpalatable and perverse.

That is not to denigrate the artform. Anyone who believes that cartoons are tomorrow's chip paper have never seen Hogarth in his finest form, fired up by fury but felled by despair.

Or George Cruickshank's Worship Of Bacchus with which he tried to capture alcohol's evil doing in an epic wall-sized work, deconstructed here by The Guardian's Steve Bell.

But - inevitably - there is fun to be had. The work is immediate. Form and message in sync. As pretension is the target of the satire, any pretension in the art would be breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

So the images and installations are robust, cheeky, devilish, frivolous, upsetting (in some cases) but never less than to the point.

As if that weren't enough wit, the guest curators add another layer. Viz's Roger Mellie curates one room.

Harry Hill's absurdist tendencies dominate another.

Gerald Scarfe updates some classic caricatures in woodcuts. Indeed, there is a re-creation of Scarfe's studio, showing how he prepares for his Sunday Times political cartoon.

In a stand-out show, Rude Britannia demonstrates that the strategies and techniques of the satirists may have changed but their targets - hierarchies, social pressures, self-delusion, sex, power and politics - have not budged an inch in 400 years.

We still need court jesters to give us a kick up the bum, a cake in the clock and a poke in the eye, all delivered to the shuddering fart sound of a deflating balloon.

Until September 5. Go to tate.org.uk

- Photograph: Courtesy Of Andrew Edmunds. Detail of Thomas Rowlandson's drawing of a French dentist's specimen.

– From June 2010

Book review: Samuel Johnson, A Biography

Samuel Johnson was a man of virtue, of words, of endeavour.

However, Johnson, despite his legacy of work that is virtually unparalleled in size and quality, is fixed in time by his caricature.

He has endured a reputation for being haughty, rude and brooding. Imagine Gordon Brown with a quill and the bearing of Robbie Coltrane and that is how he has been cast.

That version has its foundations in truth, to be certain, but it is merely a savage line drawing. Biographer Peter Martin admirably grapples with history to draw out a portrait of a far more complex and formidable figure.

Johnson was a man of contradictions. He was a pitiable physical wreck - hard of hearing, virtually blind, sick to the stomach, with appalling Tourettes and dogged by depression.

Yet he was a robust giant too with great appetites. He was quick to smite an opponent, yet he was generous to a fault.

He overcame a poor education to be the most erudite and sought after guest. He was a man of virtue who struggled with guilt at his own failings.

Martin finds a Johnson who is troubled, three-dimensional, warm and, above all, forgivable.

He gives a glimpse of what it is to walk this world as a conflicted genius, all too brilliant, all to flawed. This work is an uplifting and scholarly insight.

– From June 2010

Film review: Bad Lieutenant - Port Of Call (18)

Nicolas Cage goes from nought to c-r-a-z-y in the bat of a reptile's eye playing his meatiest character since the last time he was required to take a role for a ride.

His wide-eyed psycho two-step has found a perfect partner in director Werner Herzog whose tics and twirls behind the camera are no less eccentric.

Herzog and Cage put Terence McDonagh through the mill, recalling - but wholly re-imagining - Harvey Keitel's rotten apple in Abel Ferrara's 1993 original.

Here, the New Orleans detective rescues a prisoner from a cell drowning beneath Katrina's stinking waves and for his efforts gets a promotion to lieutenant and chronic bad pain. He takes Vicodin before progressing to more compelling medications.

So McDonagh is hunched and high for much of this film and this wrenching spasm acts as a metaphor for the tortured distortion of his moral compass.

The lieutenant's investigation of the death of a family of small-time Senegalese drug dealers brings him into contact with some big fish, including Xzibit's Big Fate, who knows his way round the rule book and keeps out of reach.

But he hasn't accounted for McDonagh's lop-sided gait which zig-zags him across the line, reaching where no straight cop can get.

And while he's pursuing his prey, McDonagh raids the police stores for powders, shakes down clubbers for their pocket stash and scares the rollers off old ladies who won't spill the necessary.

And, when his gambling debts catch up with him and the plates start spilling, he sells out wholesale to Big Fate to keep his creditors at bay.

But Cage keeps McDonagh within reach of redemption. His love for high-class hooker Frankie (Eva Mendes) keeps him invested and his flotsam and jetsam of hangers-on never taste the brutish tang of his toxic turns.

Herzog throws in some gloriously off-beat cameos to add spice to the fruitcake, with Elmore Leonard-esque bad guys facing off without a Plan B.

And if the movie occasionally judders and spurts like a Lotus with L-plates, you're never too far away from another slice of bonkers. (Iguanas singing Please Release Me, anyone?)

This is a hazy, crazy outing. A routine procedural (written by NYPD Blue's William Finkelstein) is given a whole new dimension with mesmeric Cage on blistering form, creating an ambivalent, charismatic sleazeball who might or might not seek salvation right after he's shifted another dose up that impeccable equine snozzle.

– From May 2010

Exhibition: Magnficient Maps, British Library

Maps, in chronological terms, are better at telling us where we've been than where we're going; their evolution says less about geography than it does history.

They were not so much the product of assiduous draughtsmen as narratives created by artists who exploited the creative guidance granted by their patrons.

For the understandable open-mouthed wonder which greeted these mini-masterpieces of scholarly and artistic endeavour allowed for a disreputable ruler to slip in some propaganda unnoticed. That is the message of this compact but neatly formed exhibition.

The size, placement, grandeur and detail of maps all contained a subliminal but unavoidable statement.

There is a Lear, a Robin Hood, a James Bond for every era, they say. Maps are even more telling of an age. The coastlines and rivers may stay the same - to within a certain degree of a cartographer's pen. What is contained within the features, however, is very human and not always reliable.

Head of map collections at the British Library Peter Barber said: "Maps are pictorial encyclopedias that are about far more than just geography. The artistry of the maps is subjective and like the teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down, tries to persuade us to swallow a particular political message."

Some of this spinning is free from any duplicity. Take, for example, the 1877 Serio Comic War Map by Fred Rose, which depicts Russia as a grasping octopus, a visual metaphor used 70 years later by Vichy France to show Churchill's imperial inclinations. Or the delightful - and less demonic - Tea Revives The World map of 1940.

A marvellous, understated and charming exhibition at the British Library puts the "power, propaganda and art" in context, and in appropriate settings, to highlight how maps have been used to underscore ambition, indicate status or make a satirical point.

This is why these 100 maps, dating back to Roman times, have been selected out of BL's exhaustive 4.5million-strong collection.

Through the centuries, the maps show the receding boundaries of human ignorance - the monsters of unknown lands disappear and a move towards faithful projection emerges.

But along the way to accuracy, there have been some wonders: the seven foot tall Klencke Atlas; the Chinese globe of 1623; the haunting Mappa Mundi; the Psalter world map of 1265 which stood in Henry III's bedchamber.

You will never quite see maps the same way again. Perhaps just as well.

– From May 2010