The English comic performer, writer and all-round wayward genius, Ken Campbell, liked to call his plays “capers” and he hated, despite having performed at England’s National Theatre, what he called “brochure theatre” – theatre that gets done because something has to be programmed and announced in a brochure.

His humour is wildly funny anarchic humour that is apparently very hard to pull off successfully unless Ken Campbell himself is either in the caper or directing it, which is now unlikely since he died in 2008.

So it is a tribute to Phoebe Smith and her cast and crew that mayhem was able to erupt at Bats on Thursday night and allow his mischievous spirit – a bubbling brew of Pan, Puck, Arlecchino, Spike Milligan, Lewis Carroll, Morecombe and Wise, and English panto – to live on.

Skungpoomery means thinking up new words, creating a meaning for them and then acting them out. This is the central idea of this caper and then Campbell throws in a plot about policemen trying to arrest some pajama-clad desperadoes, who have caught the skungpoomering bug and getting others to join in. 

There’s Milliganesque verbal comedy (“If your knees talk to you, ignore them.”), there’s physical comedy (a food fight that the Marx Brothers would have admired), there’s the inspired lunacy of a policeman and his overprotective mum (“It’s no woman, it’s my mum!”), and there’s lashings of good old fashioned inspired silliness.

Ash James, Debbie Fish, John Ong, Adam Donald, Tom Horder, Bronwyn Pattison, Melissa Phillips, Gina Vanessi, and Bronwyn Haines are the cast and they are all spot on with their energy, timing, and joie de vivre and they let loose on a very dull world a wonderful sense of liberating chaotic comedy.
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This absurdist piece of goonery was created in 1975 by the recently late Ken Campbell (1941-2008). “I don’t think there is a more hilariously anarchic talent on the loose in British theatre,” a Times columnist opined. It belongs to an era of hippy-yippy-happenings and alternative populist theatre aimed at blowing the starch from a grey world ruled by a conservative ‘establishment’.

It was entirely by accident that director Phoebe Smith happened upon it while cleaning out a high school theatre department cupboard. First performed in Nottingham as a children’s play, Skungpoonery is as wacky as a Goon Show and should not be confined to the young.

Thankfully Smith has not attempted to replicate an English production but has gathered a team that has totally made it their own, recreating it for a new generation. The police persons, however, do wear the old style bobby helmets which are quintessentially comical.

The play is precipitated by the discovery that “what matters is nothing matters,” which may be taken either which way or oppositely. But before this revelation and its consequences occur we are treated to the spectacle of P C Nicholas Wibble (a wonderfully childlike John Ong) being nagged at by his harridan mother, Mrs Wibble (Adam Donald in Pythonesque drag).

One spot of egg on his regulation tie plus trousers that need pressing provoke a series of incidents that see P C Wibble out on the beat in totally inappropriate clobber. But help is unwittingly at hand in the form of bed-sit philosopher Faz and his blithely naïve assistant Twoo, written as males but delightfully played as female by Ash James and Debbie Fish.

It’s Faz who, having said it matters that nothing matters and contemplated the existential state of his breakfast egg, has an epiphany and invents – to the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss), reflecting its use in 2001 Space Odyssey – Skungpoomery: the art of thinking up a new word, deciding what it means then doing it.

The practice and promulgation of Skungpoonery transforms not only the lives of P C Wibble and his superiors – Melissa Phillips’ long-suffering but lively Sergeant Snuff, and Bronwyn Haines’ stolid Inspector Snatchem – but also henpecked shop-keeper Humbottom (Tom Horder) whose distrusting Wife (the wonderfully acrobatic Bronwyn Pattison) becomes trussed in her bloomers.

It must be noted that this is a play that hates women, as jaded vaudevillian-turned-teacher Eddie Waters (from Trevor Griffiths’ hugely successful Comedians, which also premiered in 1975) might well have said. But with women playing the anarchic linguists and the senior bobbies, that nasty taste is somewhat dissipated.

Having ‘bunkjamjamered’ (smeared strawberry jam onto their pyjamas and done a bunk into the street), Faz, Twoo, P C Wibble and Humbottom utilise a couple of large rubbish bins in their quest to evade the ‘hapfunoiling’* harridans and baton-wielding ‘bonkraniummering’* cops in order to indulge in a spot of ‘shankfinerbling’ (going up to someone’s legs and finerbling them with your nose) and ‘whangbungkling’ (firing off bunklies into the air with the aid of a ruler).

Being totally unfamiliar with this new fad the constabulary conclude a Pyjama Gang is on the loose and must at all costs be brought to heel. And of course the harridans hate fun too …

In the quiet time betwixt some inspired slapstick sequences that coat the stage in all manner of substances, a special relationship develops between P C (“don’t quibble, scribble or dribble”) Wibble and Twoo. Faces drawn on knees give life to inner feelings but it is the challenge of eating a rat – in order to score some sandwiches – that provides the most compelling and memorable moment (a special accolade to that prop maker!).

It all plays out in Penny Angrick’s splendid set, brilliantly lit by Ulli Briese (although I could have done without the bright in-my-face backlight illuminating musician Will Rattray, aloft). Large filing cabinet units coated in newspaper – words, words, words –are inventively used to suggest the Wibble home, Faz & Twoo’s bedsit with kitchen, Humblebottom’s shop and the streets. The batons and bins are also paper-covered, as is the winch that doubles as a sausage machine and washing-line ‘puljamangwinder’.*

Whiteface, rosy cheeks and dark eyebrow make-up (artist Ellen Stewart) unifies the ensemble while accentuating their personalities and changing moods. Inspired by their director Phoebe Smith, all nine actors rise to the comedic challenge with alacrity, with Ong’s Wibble and Fish’s Twoo becoming especially attractive at the gently beating heart of the ‘slamayhysteribsurchic’* beast Skungpoomery has unleashed.

Highly recommended, especially for anyone needing an upbeat wind-down from the Fringe and Festival seasons.
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*(I made these ones up myself but cheated by knowing the meanings before I invented the words.)
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