A Halloween show conveniently draped with tinsel, Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas sees comedy duo Conor Grimes and Alan McKee returning to Belfast’s Lyric Theatre’s traditional festive slot for adult audiences.
Now in their third decade writing and performing together, Grimes and McKee can be relied upon to find the delightfully absurd and exquisitely surreal in even the most humdrum of situations. It’s an approach that served them well in previous Christmas shows at the venue, not least their standout The Nativity… What the Donkey Saw and the more recent Driving Home for Christmas. Similarly in their popular triptych of sporting comedies culminating with St Mungo’s The Ladies.
At their freest and best, the anarchic duo’s knowingly mischievous stage personas conjure Laurel and Hardy scripted by The League of Gentlemen and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, an amalgam that depends on them allowing room for spontaneous manoeuvre. It’s a creative lebensraum lacking in the otherwise simple but overly-convoluted premise of this show.
Bullishingly shoehorning Halloween and Christmas together into a wafer-thin narrative is not helped by a plethora of subplots that would defeat Columbo and Morse, or seem tortuously out of place in Murder She Wrote. Taking up too much of post-interval proceedings, a lengthy exposition peppered with multiple flashbacks serves only to confuse matters and expose the threadbare nature of what has been.
There are genuine laugh-out-loud moments in its tale of thwarted skulduggery set in the seemingly haunted Darkwood Manor, albeit few and far between. The problem is not with the committed performances of the four-strong cast, the under-used Grimes and over-exposed McKee valiantly supported by Ali White and Nicky Harley. The muddle is the piece itself which is neither fish nor fowl.
Even so, all are abetted by the mute, dipsomaniac multi-instrument-playing Frankie McIlvanna and regular collaborator, director Frankie McCafferty. McIlvanna’s sole line of dialogue deservedly earns one of the evening’s biggest laughs, his drunken ballet as he careens between keyboard and chaise longue a thing Chaplin would have been proud of.
A potential Christmas cracker lacking, as yet, the necessary craic, it’s a show in need of being run in and relaxed that at the moment disappoints as much as it pleases.