The Upstart Crow, Gielgud Theatre review: A deliriously silly adaptation of the acclaimed sitcom

Ben Elton’s TV smash has traded the safety of the small screen for the slings and arrows of the stage

Very skilled and attractive: David Mitchell stars in the play (Johan Persson)

★★★★☆

“Comedy, love – and a bit with a dog. That’s what they want,” declares Thomas Henslowe, the debt-ridden theatre manager in Shakespeare in Love. The Tom Stoppard-scripted movie made a blissfully talented transfer to theatre (the natural home of the material) half a decade ago. Now just as Stoppard returns to the West End with his masterpiece Leopoldstadt, without larky Shakespearean scaffolding up pops The Upstart Crow. Ben Elton’s critically acclaimed Bard-centred sitcom has forsaken the relative safety of the small screen in order to expose itself to the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune that is live performance.

The canine in Shakespeare in Love was an adorable Labradoodle called Spot. The Upstart Crow may draw on dog front. But it includes a bear, who comes in handy for gags about the difficulty of realising some of Shakespeare’s stage directions, supremely “Exit, pursued by a bear” in The Winter’s Tale. This creature has been rescued from the cruelties of a Bear Garden by the Bard’s female sidekick (played with heavenly feel for the show’s humour by Gemma Whelan). An anachronistically advanced interest in our current preoccupations – animal rights, diversity, representation – is the running gag in a show that is notionally set in a period where it was illegal for a woman to play anything on a stage. And then, of course, there are immemorial, time-honoured jokes about show business.