Following the success of last year’s Johnson & Boswell, smarty-pants comedians Simon Munnery, Miles Jupp and writer Stewart Lee regrouped for this year’s Elizabeth & Raleigh, bringing Munnery’s alarming-looking Elizabeth I into conflict with Jupp’s besotted Walter Raleigh. Was a follow-up to Johnson & Boswell something you wanted to do from the start? We all…
Historical themes are not always the easiest for a theatre group to capture, what with actual facts always getting in the way. The best and worst of these attempts are here. Warming himself to the audience like a cuddly chat show host, Sir Walter Raleigh, discoverer of worlds, champion of potatoes, begins with his particular…
LOOKING more like Heath Ledger’s Joker than the Virgin Queen, Simon Munnery is, nevertheless, surprisingly, perfectly cast as Elizabeth I in this dementedly enjoyable follow-up to Late But Live with Boswell and Johnson. Once again he’s joined by Miles Jupp, as Sir Walter Raleigh, in a show scripted by Stewart Lee. The result of all…
It’d be hard, and perhaps unfair, to talk about Stewart Lee’s follow-up to 2007’s historical comedy Johnson & Boswell without mentioning ‘the other’ alternative Elizabethan comedy. But for all its defects, one thing is certain – though Simon Munnery’s portrayal of Elizabeth I is quite different from Miranda Richardson’s in Blackadder II, it’s still as…
After last year’s fringe success Johnson and Boswell: Late but Live, Stewart Lee returns to the Scottish capital having penned another historical reanimation, this time turning his comedic eye towards the infamous relationship between England’s supposed ‘Virgin Queen’, and her favoured courtier and probable lover, Sir Walter Raleigh. However, where the former offering was well…
If last year’s Stewart Lee-penned historic character comedy Johnson And Boswell was a ramshackle, late-night treat, its successor is sadly rather closer to that inadvisable end of the evening kebab. Miles Jupp and a dragged-up, white-faced Simon Munnery return to play Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I, but they’re not really afforded the chance to…