Worth Every Penny

In a matter of minutes, Thom Tuck, David Reed and Humphrey Ker – otherwise known as the Penny Dreadfuls – seem to have transported Edinburgh’s opulent Prestonfield Hotel back to the Victorian era. Dressed as a one-eyed pirate, a cloaked policeman and a well-to-do gentleman with a moustache and bowler hat, they effortlessly set off the regal surroundings in which our rendezvous takes place, the lazy peacocks on the lawn lending their majesty to the scene. And though many passing hotel guests stop to gaze at the strangely-dressed group of actors in the corner, they don’t seem to be fazed by the attention.

After all, this ‘trio of gentleman humorists’, as they like to call themselves, have already received much acclaim for Aeneas Faversham, their Victorian-themed sketch show, since they first began their Fringe career two years ago. But their latest incarnation – Aeneas Faversham Forever – has a different, more optimistic buzz surrounding it. The production arrives in the capital with awards already under its belt: in May, the Brighton Fringe Festival named it Best Comedy Show for 2008. Obliviously, the Dreadfuls claim they didn’t even know there were awards in Brighton – but these University of Edinburgh graduates are clearly pleased with their success and are eager to talk about their impending Fringe run. Having recently moved down to London, they seem ecstatic to be back in their old student home.

Smoothing over his phony moustache between every sentence, Reed says with affection: “We love coming back here. We lived in Edinburgh for a long time, we still haven’t lived in London that long and it’s a very different lifestyle. You can walk out into the streets and you will bump into somebody you know here - it’s got the amount going on of a city and it’s got the feel of a town because you can walk anywhere.”

The three actors met while in the University’s renowned improv troupe, The Improverts, in 2001 but have only been performing as the Penny Dreadfuls since November 2005. This year, they’ve ditched their staple sketch format and formed a fully-fledged narrative, which they describe as “a murder mystery adventure set against the backdrop of Tower Bridge – a Victorian era romp.”

‘Romp’ really is the right word. The play is a delightful, rip-roaring farce. Its energetic style—all three actors play a collective 12 characters—harks back to the golden Fringe age; comparisons have already been drawn between the Dreadfuls and the likes of Fry and Laurie and Monty Python, and they are not unjust.

Their own benchmarks for comparison, however, are more contemporary. Ker, cocking his copper’s helmet, says he would like Aeneas Faversham to become a combination of The League of Gentlemen and South Park: “[Royston Vasey] is a world that people just love - you could take out all the characters in it and it would still be brilliant. We’d love to achieve the same thing. And obviously, South Park is just the best.”

Reed quickly adds: “And also Star Wars. We do hope to make prequels in the future, when we’re old and have no imagination to think of anything new, and really upset our fan base.”

This constant repartee between the actors is a large part of what gives Aeneas Faversham Forever its infectious dynamism and it’s hard not to be captivated by the optimism of the Penny Dreadfuls, or the rapturous reception that their Fringe run has received so soon into the festival.

The narrative, according to David, was penned while writing their radio show for BBC7, aired earlier this year. What’s more, they’ve already recorded a second series, scheduled for October. Speaking about the attention the radio show has garnered, Ker simply shrugs: “People seemed to like it. But the only way we’ve been able to tell if people like it or not is that more people turned up at the recording of the first series than the second series. So that kind of feels like it’s a justification of what we’re doing – and it was fun.”

It might be fun, but it’s also led to more high profile work. David, Thom and Humphrey all appear in the BBC’s upcoming sketch show, The Wrong Door, though not as the Penny Dreadfuls. In it, they all play defective superheroes and were given the mammoth task of taking the great Brian Blessed prisoner.

Eyes shining with glee at the memory, Reed says, “That was possibly the most exciting day of our collective lives. We all dressed up as ninjas and kidnapped Brian Blessed who was supposed to be King of the Pirates. Lots of people saw him on Have I Got News for You and he is really like that in real life. It’s not a show, and if it is, there’s no intermission. He is just like that the whole time.” Tuck rubs his pirate’s eye patch and shakes his head in retrospective exasperation: “He just wouldn’t stop talking.”

Would they like to take Aeneas Faversham to television? “We’re very much frustrated television writers. We think of something and it’s like ‘That’s brilliant! But oh, we can’t do it on the stage,’” laments Reed. “We like doing stuff we haven’t done before – we got better at sketches and thought, what next?”

Despite these limitations, they’re unlikely to leave Aeneas Faversham behind anytime soon. “We enjoy it so much – the Victorian theme has not been the bane of our lives, quite far from it.” Humphrey says: “A lot of people said to us, ‘Oh the Victorian thing is great, but you must find it very constrictive’, but that's not it at all. It makes it much easier because the rules are there – you know your world, you know what works and what doesn’t.”

When preparing for their Victorian adventures, however, the history books are left firmly on the shelves. According to David, “A Muppet Christmas Carol is heavy source material for us - and Round the World in 80 Days,” while Humphrey adds Sherlock Holmes and Disney’s Basil the Great Mouse Detective to the list. Even Die Hard makes the cut – “It’s basically the story of Britain’s rise to industrial dominance in the latter half of the 1830s set in an airport in Chicago in the 1990s – one of the greatest Victorian stories not set in the Victorian era.”

They’re all huge Doctor Who fans too, citing David Tennant as technically the best but Peter Davidson as their favourite. David says, “It’s the kind of show where you can do anything and have fun with it – it’s a real playground of a show. That’s very attractive and that’s why we’ve kept to our show for so long, because we can do so many things with it. It really is a playground world so you can just keep chucking ideas out.”

But, despite praising Doctor Who’s “intelligent and pacifist spirit”, thoughts turn to duels quite quickly. Tuck pipes up: “We have to slam Pappy’s Fun Club, they slammed us on BBC7. They’re our arch nemesis and they’re also playing at the Pleasance. We took the same day off so we don’t have to watch their stupid show.”

Like everything with Aeneas Faversham, it’s all good spirited, though: Ker relents, “We decided to pick fights with people we like – so when we nemesis each other, we’re at least having a good time.”

It’s this sort of light-hearted fun that seems to characterise everything the Penny Dreadfuls do, and is also the reason that Aeneas Faversham is likely to be one of the real highlights of this year’s Fringe. In a year when the uproar over the Edinburgh Comedy Festival seems to be eclipsing the profiles of the comics themselves, it’s heartening to see an up-and-coming act generate such widespread excitement.

Aeneas Faversham Forever is certain to keep its audiences wanting more from the Penny Dreadfuls, though the trio don’t seem to anticipate this. Commenting on their namesake – Penny Dreadfuls were cheap Victorian novels for boys, derided by the literary elite for their sensationalism – Tuck conjectures, “We always thought the Penny Dreadfuls were a good name – something that is entertaining but essentially throwaway.”

Ker agrees: “There are a lot of shows at the Fringe that really have a message – and good on them, but we wanted to have an hour where people can laugh and laugh and be left alone.” That the Penny Dreadfuls will be awarded the same solace after winning over what looks to be a new legion of devotees is beginning to look much more unlikely.