Animal Quackers
Kenneth Branagh is Back With a Brilliantly Silly Duck Extravaganza

The Observer, 23 October 2005
By Susannah Clapp

It's got shell suits as well as eggshells, and a man dressed up as a silver sperm who gets ejaculated from a cannon. There's an exit pursued by a duck, a joke about a hip replacement flask, and a troupe of Eastern Europeans doing gymnastics in plum-coloured wet suits.

'Ducktastic' is Sean Foley and Hamish McColl's compulsively silly follow-up to 'The Play What I Wrote'. That was inspired by Morecambe and Wise, and directed by Kenneth Branagh. This, also with Branagh directing, takes wing from Siegfried and Roy, Las Vegan illusionists.

McColl - swivel-eyed, madly grinning and slightly less demure than Gary Glitter - is an illusionist called Christopher Ursula Sassoon ('See you, Sassoon') who hopes to win back his wife by sleight of hand. Foley is his goofy stooge, who appears in the stalls carrying a pot of huge leaves ('We don't want any plants in the audience') and gets up on stage to - among other things - pop out of the Garden of Eden once as God and once as Adam, and do eel-like slither dances around the stage.

Siegfried and Roy worked with tigers; Foley and McColl have substituted ducks, although the understudy of the avian star Daphne (unavailable at the premiere on account of her abducktion) has the tigerish name of Sabre. It's hopeless as a spoof: why bother? But it's canny at getting an audience caught in the crossfire of jokes and tricks. It's the perfect non-creepy seasonal alternative to a panto.

On the one hand, there's the magic. Some of it is transparent: you're meant to work out how the fridge that looked fully stocked now has a woman inside it. Some of it is mildly revealing: it may be worth knowing how to fake a knife-throwing ('Wait for the sound effect' gives you a clue to the way you see what you hear). Some of it is unfathomable. It's impossible to see how the bubbly usherette gets chopped in half and ends up waving at her verruca. On the other hand, there is the barrage of gags: ingenious, dodgy and ingeniously dodgy. Half the time you don't know whether to gasp or giggle. You end up not exactly transported, but winded and feeble. Unless, of course, you're stuck in a large Egyptian river: that's to say, in denial.


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