Cock and Bull

Compare and contrast: The Romans in Britain, A Cock and Bull Story.
Mary Whitehouse did The Romans in Britain a big favour when she started her fundamentalist yapping about the buggery scene. The play is less than the sum of its parts, and its parts aren’t up to much either. It draws poetical but otherwise vacuous parallels between the Roman and the Saxon invasions of South East Britain, and the British occupation of Ireland. There is also much cursory killing; not shocking, just so undeveloped as to be inconsequential. It was one of those plays where you guess the director had suddenly realised his task was hopeless far too late in rehearsal and the cast were left floundering with no clear idea of what they were meant to be doing. The set had a wonderful edifice at the back like a full size whale shaped out of a single piece of worn driftwood, but apart from that my attention kept wondering irritably - why when plays are hollow are actors so actorly, faking exaggerated emotion - and why did the patricidal girl have such twenty-first century knickers on under her figure hugging quasi-Celtic dress; and why did her Dad, having cut the artful turf along the dotted lines with a dagger, scooped some earth from under the stage and then extracted a statue of a Pagan Goddess of staggering mystical reverberance vis a vis the plot if you like that sort of thing but horribly banal otherwise, then put it (the goddess) back in the hole, reverently replaced the earth, put the astroturf back; why did he have to cut the fake sward in exactly the same place with a huge great sword when he decided to dig her up again three minutes later? And why were the corn shocks straight out of Ladies in Lavender? And most of all why do actors run from place to place in that very annoying skippy way as if they were auditioning for Andy Pandy? Nobody else ever runs like that. I’m not against actors, I have a genuinely high regard for them. Most of them are hard working, responsible and dedicated. But if the play is bad, and they are not absolutely on top of their work, they can excite tetchiness.
A Cock and Bull Story was wonderful. It was funny, sharp, insightful, slightly moving and very very clever - in a British and pragmatic way, as suited Sterne’s story, written when the various nations of these islands produced, briefly, the cleverest ideas in the world. There were lots of allusions to other films, just clever enough that I could feel superior for getting them but not so hyper-intelligent and arcane that they went miles above my head, like that silly Zazie dans le Métro which we all had to laugh at when I was a student. And it really did get together a lot of the Tristram Shandy novel, a seemingly impossible task, in a very small space. Everything seemed to tie in with everything else in an unexpected way like those eleven dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds that have something to do with string theory - producing huge amounts of virtual narrative energy at each intersection, so that in the end you were left with an experience that continued to expand from the pressure of its own imagery long after the show was over. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were pretty funny too. Oh it was good.