'Frankly Outrageous' tells the tale of Frank, Chris and Tom, three dodgy geezers united by childhood friendship and a murky incident from the past which comes back to haunt them at the wake of their friend Bob, with which the play opens. It is a loud, testosterone-doused crime drama with little in the way of nuance, originality or relevance. The British gangster has so much dramatic potential (as 'Sexy Beast' and the superb Mark Strong BBC series 'The Long Firm' demonstrate), but 'Frankly Outrageous' is a dull, paint-by-numbers corpse-and-cash affair with a fantastically self-indulgent central performance. Mike Weedon's Frank flits between psychotic fury and almost Kenneth Williams-esque cooing ('Ooh, aren't we the precious one!') with no middle ground to provide any emotional depth or verisimilitude. The plot is banal, the humour pat and the twist at the end a slap round the audience's weary chops. One senses that writer Calolm Macgregor, who also plays Tom, intends the play to be more than three men shouting about money over their fish and chips and to grapple, instead, with weightier themes. For instance, the play raises the interesting conflict between Tom's shame of his working roots and Frank's sanctimonious pride at having overcome them, but it does so little with it. The play purports, in the programme, to 'explore the human psyche revealing how social status, geography and misfortune can lead to power struggles, wrapped in greed', but it boils down to a self-made bald man shouting at two friends and fleecing them out of money he doesn't need, like a sort of crazed Del Boy. The play could go so much further with these universal notions of revenge and greed coloured by a modern-day working-class chippiness, but favours tiresome histrionics and superficial platitudes.If you want to watch three money-fuelled middle-aged men shout at each other for an hour whilst strutting about the stage in sharp suits (presumably from Moss Bros, judging by the advert in the programme), then this is the play for you. But I'm afraid I found this an unsatisfying, unironic and mildly unpleasant piece of work that thinks it's cleverer than it is. A bit like Frank himself.
