Steptoe and Son in Murder at Oil Drum Lane

2 / 5 stars 2 out of 5 stars.
Comedy, London
Steptoe and Son in Murder at Oil Drum Lane, Comedy, London
'You dirty old man!' ... Jake Nightingale and Harry Dickman as Harold and Albert Steptoe. Photograph: Tristam Kenton

The programme is a dead giveaway. It contains an advert for DVDs of the original, classic series of Steptoe and Son.

Given that the past is now available at the press of a button, it seems peculiarly pointless for the theatre to engage in its own form of competitive nostalgia. Who needs a facsimile when they can have the real thing?

Ray Galton and his new partner, John Antrobus, would doubtless argue they are giving fresh life to familiar characters. The premise here is that Steptoe fils, having finally killed his dad with an assegai, returns to the family home, in Oil Drum Lane, Shepherd's Bush, from life as a fugitive in Rio.

First he discovers the junk-filled parlour has been taken over by the National Trust. An even bigger shock is finding the place haunted by his father's ghost. Shackled once again to the old man, the hapless Harold relives a life of endless humiliation.

The result is not so much a play as variations on a single theme: lost episodes from the Steptoe past loosely strung together. At its worst this leads to a grotesque scene in which Albert sells his son to the Nazis in 1936: it's hard to raise much of a laugh when the teenage Harold returns from Germany announcing: "I've got a proficiency-badge in book-burning." And even if later sequences, such as one in which Harold discovers he is intimately related to his lost love, marginally raise the tone, they still feel like illustrations of a lone idea.

The great thing about the TV series was that it transcended the narrow rules of sitcom. Watching father and son yoked together in mutual need, it was possible to be reminded of Samuel Beckett's bleak vision of marriage: "Alone together - so much shared."

But, in re-creating the relationship for the stage, Galton and Antrobus return to something closer to the comedy-sketch format. Much of the original pathos is lost, and what you get is a series of contrived fragments all leading to a neat pay-off.

The saving grace is Jake Nightingale's Harold. He re-creates the character's social aspirations and dodgy aspirates and, while echoing Harry H Corbett's rhythms, still manages to claim the part as his own.

There's a moment when he cries "inured to the vicissitudes of my hapless existence" and slowly allows a smile of triumph to spread across his features. Instead of laughing at his pretensions, one is allowed to share his delight in language.

Harry Dickman conscientiously reproduces Albert's squinnying nastiness, Nigel Hook's set is dutifully cluttered and Roger Smith's production gives the show a certain hectic momentum.

But in the end one is puzzled by the point of it all. Better, I'd suggest, to live off memories of a golden series than to watch this leaden spin-off.

· Until April 22. Box office: 0870 060 6637