Banana with Appeal

Cambridge Circus. A good guffaw nowadays is hard to find. Onstage and on film comedy has gone cosmic--as if dramatists were engaged in a campaign to laugh wars, capital punishment and lung cancer out of existence. The big news about Cambridge Circus is that it thinks small and carries a big slapstick. The manic, unassuming young graduates of Cambridge University who wrote and perform in the revue would rather tickle a rib than wash a brain, and more often than not they are indescribably funny.

Their free-flowing antics can scarcely be congealed in print. One sight gag typifies the impish inventiveness that animates the evening. A man (Jonathan Lynn) holding a banana like a revolver starts firing away at imaginary foes, kapow! kapow! kapow! Suddenly the banana goes silent. He peels it down, throws the banana into the orchestra pit, keeps the skin, takes another peeled banana from a paper wrapper, inserts it meticulously in the empty skin, and resumes firing. Kapow!

Though the Cantabrigians--six men and a girl--keep their eyes on the oddball, they also have a wayward way with words. Sounding like the BBC, B.C., a newscaster announces unctuously, "Here beginneth the first verse of the news," goeth on to report the latest Old Testament news flashes. Sports items include a heavyweight bout: "At the weigh-in for the big fight tomorrow, Goliath tipped the scales this evening at 15 stone 3 lbs. and David at 14 stone 3 lbs. David's manager said this evening, 'the odd stone could make all the difference.' " The biblical newscast concludes with a brief theater review: "At the first night of The Gaza Strip, Samson, this year's Mr. Israel, brought down the house."

At times, there is a dearth of mirth. Takeoffs on murder mystery and trouble-in-paradise movies poke along rather predictably; the idea of Antony delivering Caesar's funeral oration while struggling frantically to hold onto the unwieldy corpse is funnier in promise than performance. On the other hand, when the cast dons wigs and choirboys' surplices for a spastic rock-'n'-roll number called "I Wanna Hold Your Handel," they memorably spoof both the composer and the Beatles, with a blasting hallelujah! yeah! yeah! The evening ends in a British courtroom with a bewigged theater-of-the-absurd farce-trial involving a dwarf that is hilarious enough all by itself to make the show Broadway's Circus Maximus.

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