Dare you go... Inside No.9?

Silly scares and other fun stuff in London this week

Reece Shearsmith in Inside No. 9: Stage/Fright. Photo: Marc Brenner

There are very few performance situations where you can just walk into the ladies loos, while the queue for the men's snakes up the corridor and into the bar. One of these is a folk club. Another, I discovered this week when I nipped in just before the end of the interval, is at Inside No. 9: Stage/Fright at the Wyndham’s.

What I’ve seen

Inside No.9 is that kind of cult TV. It doesn’t have any specific gender bias, the female characters are just as funny, but it’s made by cheerfully weird nerdy men (Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who wrote and star in this theatrical extension of the show, bonded with their frequent collaborator Mark Gatiss when they found out that all of them had once stayed in on New Year’s Eve because Carry On Screaming was on the telly) for people like them, and men seem to absolutely love it. And some women, yes, definitely, but on the evidence of the loo situation, the real enthusiasts are mostly men.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. For those who don’t know, Inside No.9 is an anthology TV show, which has now run for nine series. Every episode is a new story, with a new cast (except Shearsmith and Pemberton, who are nearly always both in it) relating in some tenuous way to the number nine, with a mix of black comedy and horror. There’s always a bronze hare in it somewhere.

It’s one of those things that, when the creators are interviewed years later, they say “we couldn’t believe someone was letting us do it”, having made a barnstorming success of something apparently completely ridiculous (I think in Britain we have an inherent appreciation for such things, but it’s still slightly astonishing).

The inevitable stage version, which is at the Wyndham’s until April 5, directed by Simon Evans, is, as my London Theatre Review podcast co-presenter Nick Curtis said on the night, a brilliant and curious combination of the very clever and the bleeding obvious. The events on stage are a surprise, the jokes aren’t.

Focused (though perhaps in the chaos that’s not the right word) around the idea of haunted theatres (I don’t think there’s a West End theatre open that doesn’t have a ghost) it’s a mad dash from one scenario to the next, including a revisit of the old Inside No. 9 tale Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room - about a pair of washed up old end-of-the-pier sketch comedians - plus a kidnap scene and a play about a sinister asylum director within a play about a haunted theatre. In an ostensibly haunted theatre.