Dick Barton Special Agent

Following the success of Dick Barton and The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Tomb, three years ago, MDG has obviously decided to revisit the genre with Dick Barton – Special Agent. This is a wonderful spoof that is full of double entendres (some really rather racy), public school digs and good humour at the expense of Jonny Foreigner.  All the usual jokes about “Dick”, the cod foreign accents and the verbal misunderstandings, arising from a conversation between a drugged Snowy and a nazified Scarheart, were in the mix; and occasional song pastiches additionally sent up a whole list of soft targets from English tea-drinking to musicals themselves.   MDG was fortunate to have Scott Peters, Ben Markham and Ian McDonald respectively, reprising the key roles of Dick Barton and his working class sidekicks, Snowy and Jock.   Most of the other roles were recast or simply new, including the villains, Baron Scarheart, Marta Heartburn and the BBC Announcer.

 After re-reading my original review I am forced to conclude that my impression of this latest version was not quite as I remember it and I suspect the reasons are twofold; firstly the genre has less impact when you have seen it before and secondly the singing was not as strong this time around. While nobody expects a drama group performing a complete spoof to include great singing you do expect to be able to hear it. In the absence of mikes this was always going to be difficult with all but the biggest voices, so one possibility might have been to have turned the piano/backing tracks way down and to have brought the singers absolutely front of stage or alternatively to have suspended a couple of mikes from the ceiling to give the voices a boost (songs only). The fact that there seemed to be rather more music this time around accentuated the issue but that may have been a trick of my memory.

Having said all this the production was very entertaining and contained some very funny scenes. This may have been a function of the writing but all credit to Ian Mcdonald in D’Arcy mode, whether sober when flirting with a hugely entertaining Sandra Dudley as Lady Laxington, or stoned when trying to converse with an increasingly apoplectic Neil Fisher as Scarheart. These two scenes were hilarious and were played for maximum effect.  Neil Fisher delivered a strong characterisation as the high-pitched Scarheart but could have sent it up even more by the simple expedient of enunciating “und” (and) more explosively. David Ford also did well as the Radio Announcer dipping in and out of Standard English as SPLUNK in his thermos took its toll while Marta Heartburn (Ghislaine Davis) delivered a highly credible foreign agent but I wondered whether the kisses were also French! 

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