STEPTOE AND SON Lyric, Hammersmith

Emma Rice, artistic director of the innovative Cornish company, Kneehigh, stages four scripts from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s popular sit coms of the 1960’s and 1970’s as if they were music hall sketches and adds song and dance. It’s amiable enough; but it never quite works. What we are given is a relationship, plus fantasies, rather than a story-line. Dean Nolan and Mike Shepherd are, deliberately, nothing like the warring father and son rag-and-bone merchants, created by Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, and come up with two much more likeable and softer characters. Nolan, a very big, burly, agile guy, throws his weight about to big comic effect.