Jeepers Creepers, Leicester Square Theatre, review: Marty Feldman did little to deserve such inept treatment

Cramped, uncomfortably intimate space intensifies the sense that this is an airless, poky exercise of a play

David Boyle as Marty Feldman and Rebecca Vaughan as Lauretta Feldman in 'Jeepers Creepers' (Steve Ullathorne)

The creators of Jeepers Creepers are fully certified aficionados of Marty Feldman. The script is by Robert Ross, the author of an acclaimed biography of the pop-eyed comedian. The director is Terry Jones, one of the Monty Python team-members who, as young Turks, were professionally associated with Feldman, either on The Frost Report or that Python-precursor At Last the 1948 Show. But the play is so incompetent and misjudged that you find yourself wondering what our hero can possibly have done to them to deserve such inept posthumous treatment.

The basement studio of the Leicester Square Theatre is a cramped, uncomfortably intimate space which intensifies the sense that this is an airless, poky exercise that, instead of exploiting the dramatic potential of a concentrated, claustrophobic situation, has landed itself with insufficient room for manoeuvre. We catch up with Feldman's career in 1974 when he is playing the role of the hunch-backed, bulbous-eyed retainer, Igor, for Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein and is on the cusp of major Hollywood success. They love him here, he insists. He's the only actor whom the studios have insured in case he falls down and is “figured. As in disfigured, Keep up,” he jests in a stream of flustered, effortful patter. David Boyle may not have Feldman's manic energy (he seems to have been subdued by by an incongruous dash of Charlie Drake) but he projects almost to a fault how compulsive jokiness is a sign of insecurity and mistrust of people.

“I'm not sure what is worse – being a comedian or being married to one,” grizzles Marty's ambitious, power-behind-the-throne spouse, Lauretta (Rebecca Vaughan). This two-hander suggests that it's not exactly a load of laughs being stuck with such an endlessly bickering couple either. You can tell that she has taken to the Beverley Hills lifestyle by the fact that she seems to recline in bed all day, puffing fags and irritably riffling through Vogue. But she's terrified that Marty will sabotage their chances of the big time by going on talk shows and telling disreputable stories about such early career highlights as travelling with a nude revue called Saucy Girls of 1952.

Lumbered with a script that can't dramatise Lauretta's contradictions convincingly, Vaughan is left repetitiously lurching between incredulous indignation at Marty's irresponsibility and the fact that “success has gone to his crotch” and tearful, clutching assurances that he's a beautiful soul and her best friend. “You get women,” she breathes, Marty typically trampling on the moment with the quip that he thought that was the problem. The comedian's predicament – a natural misfit exiled in the capital of conformist studio executives who had destroyed his hero, Buster Keaton; a homesick, conflicted man driven deeper and deeper into the bottle and towards a fatal heart attack at 48 – is rendered with an almost uncanny lack of tension or urgency. Anyone coming new to Feldman through this lifeless, minimally directed show would not be inclined, I feel, to embark on further excavation.

To February 20; 020 7734 2222