Sam Eley Is Basil Crumbwick review – cantankerous cult hit brings laugh after laugh

2 hours ago 1

Every room in Edinburgh has its ghosts, and its particular character. This one is all about the late-night cult hits, from Rob Kemp’s Evil Dead-meets-Elvis mashup nine years ago to Joe Kent-Walters’ debut as Frankie Monroe – a character whom this year’s cult-in-waiting, Sam Eley as Basil Crumbwick, slightly resembles.

Crumbwick is Eley with a giant papier-mache head on, an unreconstructed git with bulging bloodshot eyes and strips of carpet for what is left of his hair. He’s an unlikely candidate to be addressing us all in a cellar at an arts festival. But, having been banned from all his favourite Peterborough pubs, what’s a big-headed old bigot to do?

You might have misgivings about trapping yourself in a dungeon with this unlovely an outlook, and with a character who, like Frankie Monroe, screams at you if you step out of line. Nor can I claim new trails are being blazed by an act who brings to mind Vic and Bob or (obviously) Frank Sidebottom before them. The show is conventionally assembled, as Basil rants about his “rat” of a neighbour, Beverly, ruminates on the relative merits of having sex with or eating a pig, and reads extracts from a self-help guide he’s written – which offers reveries about visiting the Playboy mansion as a solution to all your mental health ills.

No denying the illicit thrill of his off-colour pontificating – even if one wonders whether we’re mocking the character’s bigotry here, or indulging it. Of course, Eley clarifies that Basil’s opinions are those of a lonely and embittered old cove, trying and failing to befriend his bin man. And there’s more to the character than a dyspeptic worldview. It’s all richer and stranger than that: see the Treason for Beginners class he teaches at his local church.

But really, the character, and our experience, is redeemed by Eley’s fantastic joke-writing, which guarantees laugh after unexpected laugh as Basil comes to miss his departing nemesis Beverly, and Eley sweats to near-death under his prosthetic head. An arresting new comedy alter ego is born, another late-night cult hit assured.