Review: King Arthur at Theatre by the Lake

“…possibly the funniest show for both children and adults on tour…”

King Arthur by John Nicholson, Theatre by the Lake

By Ken Powell

Let me be clear from the start – this production is silly. Very silly.

We’re talking Monty Python meets Fawlty Towers meets Carry On meets Horrible Histories kind of silly. It’s ridiculous.

It’s also brilliant.

There’s no prizes for guessing that King Arthur is…well…about the legends of King Arthur. Which is precisely all you can truly say about our first great king of this land. It’s all legend. As David Mitchell says in his book, Unruly, about this king: he doesn’t exist. And that’s really where we go with the plot of this story. Three medieval idiots, after a drunken party, get embroiled into producing a show that will promote the heroic deeds of a teenage King Arthur and his knights when, frankly, they haven’t done anything heroic at all. If the trio fail, it’s the chop for them!

You might ascertain that this is a show for kids. You might also glean that there’s more than an element of pantomime about the production too (and pantos at Easter are increasingly a thing nationwide, it seems). You’d not be wrong – but you wouldn’t be entirely right either. For a start, this takes raunchy and bawdy humour to another level right from the beginning (don’t say you weren’t warned) that will have adults and children laughing out loud, but often for very different reasons. If you’re at all prudish or sensitive, this might not be the one to bring your grandchildren to.

For the rest of us, you certainly have to embrace absurdity but – oh boy – what fun it is to do so. Rather surreptitiously, that seems to be the point Le Navet Bete, the production team behind this show, want to make about the King Arthur legends – the stories about this great ‘King of the Britons’ are all rather absurd, when you really think about it.

A three ‘man’ band (with an all-important fourth woman doing a lot of semi-hidden work), the actors play a host of roles, so much so that it gets confusing – not just for us but, apparently, for the actors too! – but it is all very funny to watch. Nick Bunt, Al Dunn and Matt Freeman abound in both physical resilience – bouncing around the stage for two hours – and pure comic genius. They’re all a delight but, without a doubt, Matt Freeman (playing Dave ‘The Rave’) is absolutely hilarious. He had us crying with laughter, often without saying a word. His zany antics really are the driving force of the show.

Not everything is perfect. Sometimes the backing track to songs drowns out some of the words being sung. The second act also feels just slightly too long, which is a pity because its very, very good. It felt like some younger members of the audience were waning near the end, but only slightly. It is exhausting because you guffaw so much. Many around me were actually crying and shrieking with laughter. Your sides certainly hurt by the end.

Nevertheless, whatever you want to call this – panto, slapstick, utter silly nonsense – if you have a funny bone left in you and/or have older children who can deal with some OMG naughtiness, you should come see this show. It’s possibly the funniest show for both children and adults on tour at the moment. King Arthur is at least a firm rival to The Play that Goes Wrong, which is its obvious comparison. If you like that production or its various versions, you will enjoy King Arthur. You’ll never look at the legends in the same way again.

King Arthur plays at Theatre by the Lake until Saturday 12 April. Tickets are available here.

Ken Powell is chief editor for Northern Arts Review and is also a bestselling author and writer for various publications around the world. A former school teacher, he continues to write educational books along with fiction and travelogues. You can find all his books and various websites here including his popular TEDx talk about the Global Village. He lives with his family in a wonderfully isolated village in West Cumbria where he enjoys drinking tea, chatting with the birds and winding up his dog. You can support his work (or just buy him a coffee) here.