Jack Absolute Flies Again (London) London Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (39)
See it if You like clever witty writing and really funny performances. We laughed from start to finish!
Don't see it if You don’t like on the nose, or silly humour.
See it if You like One Man Two Governors. Engaging and clever show that is playful and entertaining.
Don't see it if Vulgarity offends you. You like your evenings out light and easy. Read more
See it if you enjoy a clever playful comedy farce. Miscommunication, mistaken identity & frightfully spiffing mad over the top likeable characters.
Don't see it if you don’t enjoy comedy farce.
See it if you want an evening of roaring laughter and brilliant gags- though some are perhaps a little obvious- delivered with suitable panache.
Don't see it if you’re easily offended by swearing or references to sex or if you want your humour with a dose of subtlety and nuance.
See it if you enjoy classic British comedy & are already familiar with it's inspiration Sheridan's "The Rivals." It's a fun 1940s romp on the old play
Don't see it if you don't love tried & true, old-school, tongue-in-cheek humor. It stays true to it's Restoration-era comedy roots just with modern dialogue
See it if Easy comedy. Lighthearted and enjoyable.
Don't see it if If you're looking for something serious.
See it if you're looking for a self-aware play that's truly laugh-out-loud funny, with rapid fire hysterical moments, starring a wonderful cast.
Don't see it if you're looking for anything beyond laughs. Play is overstuffed with gimmicks, puns, pratfalls, breaking of 4th wall etc. leaving it hollow.
See it if Slap stick humour
Don't see it if Swearing and ad libs
Critic Reviews (10)
"This knowing mix of satire, filth, clowning, pastiche, wartime derring-do and romance absolutely hit my sweet spot. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but not even the hardest heart could entirely resist its machine-gun barrage of humour."
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"It’s funny. It’s fine. We all need a chuckle at the moment. But ‘Jack Absolute Flies Again’ isn’t anything more than the sum of its laughs. "
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"This is the second consecutive show at the National to glance nostalgically back at a bygone Britain and present a sentimentalised picture. For me, at almost three hours on its final preview night, this comedy felt forced, unoriginal and drawn out."
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"There isn’t room to summarise all the complications of the plot. Suffice to say that Quentin delivers her fruity double entendres with aplomb, and even gets a chance to reveal her talent as a vaudevillean."
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"Mark Thompson’s design illustrates the production’s sweet spot: a technicolour combination of comic book and live action, Englishness as an aesthetic and a myth. 'Jack Absolute' is more content to cuddle up to that myth than to seriously challenge it, but as pure summer fizz, it goes down a treat."
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"For the most part 'Jack Absolute Flies Again' is content to deal in comfortable nostalgia of the barrel-rolled hair and bomber-jacket variety, familiar wartime tropes given a sitcom sheen. It’s always relatively entertaining, often very funny indeed, but its frothiness becomes tiresome after a while and it’s more celebratory than interrogative of the time it’s portraying."
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“Where things start to go awry is when Jack Absolute Flies Again starts not being a comedy. It’s set during the war, there are difficult moments to explore, but this play tries to be too many things at once. The result is a near-three-hour long show, and towards the end you start to realise you really can have too much of a good thing”
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"The performances are uniformly (no pun intended) superb, and the company have an infectious joie-de-vivre. ... Although the pandemic delayed its premiere, 'Jack Absolute Flies Again' proves the perfect tonic to the miserable few years we have been through."
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