Cultural Dessert

Investment banker ‘Alex’ is the star of a Daily Telegraph strip cartoon by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor. Opportunely milking the current financial turmoil, Peattie and Taylor have adapted ‘Alex’ for the stage as a one-man show, currently touring with Robert Bathurst, which we saw last Friday at the Royal Theatre, Northampton. The show ingeniously combined Bathurst’s performance with animated characters from the cartoon, projected on an assorted series of screens around the stage (the second week running where projected animations threatened to steal the show). Robert Bathurst’s interaction with his two-dimensional co-stars (for whom he provided all the voices) was very slick. It was also interesting to see the integration of the four-frame gags from the strip cartoon with over-arching plot and characters development (also so effectively achieved by Harry Venning and David Ramsden in the ‘Clare in the Community radio series, reviewed here in January 2007 and December 2007). ‘Alex’ reminded me a lot of Radio 4’s excellent ‘Weak at the Top’ sitcom by Guy Browning – though I think Alexander Armstrong’s John Weak was slightly more cynically ruthless. Great fun.