More of a slow trickle than a roaring torrent of laughs.
When a play is titled Churchill’s Urinal, you enter the theater expecting a healthy dose of the bizarre. Satire built around such eccentric premises requires a razor-sharp focus and a relentless comedic pace to succeed. Unfortunately, the production currently running at the King’s Head Theatre, written by and starring Rosie Holt, struggles to transform its unconventional premise into a cohesive or genuinely hilarious piece of theater. While the evening is not entirely devoid of humor, managing a consistent level of polite chuckles, it ultimately fails to deliver the great, roaring laughs that a high-concept comedy like this desperately needs to stay afloat.
Frequent asides to the audience with topical political jokes feel quite out of place, and the overreliance on conversations with unseen and unheard characters on the phone begins to feel very one-note. A subplot involving Holt’s character’s divorce tries to bring forth an earnest, heartbreaking moment, but it ends up feeling unearned and uncharacteristic for the character, tonally jarring against the broader farce.
Thankfully, the production receives a much-needed shot of adrenaline precisely when it needs it most. The moment Michael Lambourne arrives on stage halfway through the performance, the entire energy of the room undergoes a dramatic shift. Lambourne injects a fierce, magnetic dynamism into the proceedings, instantly capturing the audience’s flagging attention and pulling the play out of its sluggish doldrums. His performance brings a wave of extra energy and interest, providing a tantalizing glimpse of how engaging the rest of the show could be if the entire script operated at that same high caliber.
Holt has the unenviable task of “straight-manning” the absurd gurning and attention-grabbing Lambourne performance. Holt’s stronger moments actually came from her asides to the audience in which she delivered what seemed like snippets from a stand-up routine, which made me wonder if that would be a better vehicle for the comedy rather than an absurdist, high-concept narrative about an errant urinal.
Ultimately, this show simply fails to bring the laughs that you need from a production such as this. While it is by no means an unenjoyable or uncomfortable watch, it did feel overly long, even though its runtime is only 70 minutes. A tighter script and a firmer commitment to its narrative structure might have saved it, but as it stands, Churchill’s Urinal creates a bit of a stink.
Churchill’s Urinal is playing at the Kings Head Theatre until 6th June.