Tombstone Tales and Boothill Ballads

Arcola, London
2 out of 5 2
A scene from Tombstone Tales and Boothill Ballads, Arcola, London
Scuppered by self-indulgence ... Tombstone Tales and Boothill Ballads. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The town of Tombstone in Arizona has been mythologised in Hollywood movies such as Gunfight at the OK Corral. Carl Heap's parlour entertainment is based on the simple but brilliant premise of telling the stories behind the epitaphs found on the markers of the graves in the nearby Boothill cemetery.

  1. Tombstone Tales and Boothill Ballads
  2. Arcola,
  3. London
  4. E8 2DJ
  1. Until December 20
  2. Box office:
    020-7503 1646
  3. Venue website

Heap's show, drawing on the popular forms of the day such as melodrama, Gilbert & Sullivan and cowboy ballads, is an affectionate reclamation of ordinary lives passed over by Hollywood, but resurrected here with some invention. So the scalping of Crazy Mike, who mistakenly thought he had the Apaches fooled, becomes a Hiawatha-style narrative poem, and the short life of the child who falls off his stilts is a playground ditty.

It's a neat idea, and at 80 minutes or so it would be a surefire hit. But it runs out of energy and inventiveness long before its two and a half hours are up, despite the best efforts of the personable cast. As the punch line is always death, the interest here must be in the way the story is told, and too often they feel similar. What the show needs is tighter storytelling (the dirge about a suicide goes on for an eternity), greater pace and more visual interest. There are few moments to match the opening, as the cast rise up from open graves while their fates are recounted. There is a wonderfully cartoonish quality to these demises, which include death by rapid consumption, hanging or being squashed in a stampede.

The longer stories need more of this kind of brief wit, and although some sustain themselves - including the tale of a fatal argument over a checked shirt - too many fall flat. Self-indulgence scuppers a potentially great little show.

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