With his painted face and demonic demeanour, Joe Kent-Walters’ alter ego Frankie Monroe has been compared to the League of Gentlemen’s Papa Lazarou. It’s Lazarus he more resembles in this follow-up to last year’s debut, which won Kent-Walters a best newcomer award. In Live!!!, the monstrous MC of a Rotherham working men’s club was dragged to hell after the expiry of his pact with Satan. In Dead!!!, he rises again, after a stint as entertainment officer in the underworld, to reclaim his club from a scarier foe than the devil himself: gentrification.
That’s the premise for a show that doubles down on, rather than develops, the formula that hit paydirt for the Huddersfield man last summer. And why not? Kent-Walters has devised something outrageously funny and bizarre here, a charismatic ghoul of an alter ego, terrorising his audience with a series of crap cabaret acts, delivered in a voice as deep and gravelly as a quarry in the bowels of hell. He appears in fewer guises this time, but his tatty ventriloquist’s doll, Mucky Little Pup, returns, and Kent-Walters swaps jackets to star as the usurper of Frankie’s club, Vegas Dave, too.
More scally than yuppie, Dave – from loathed Lancashire – is nevertheless taking the Misty Moon upmarket (“schooner of creme fraiche for you, madam?”) Can our (anti)hero escape the clutches of Beelzebub and save the day? If that’s to happen, we must help: Kent-Walters embroils his audience in every set-piece here, whether that’s trading blows with Frankie’s “gammon hammer”, judging his gameshow Wine or Brine?, or singing along with his demented ditties (“I’m on me ’olidays”; “Egg in a bag”) – which in their gleefully aggressive idiocy summon, to comedy fans of my generation, Alexei Sayle’s blunt earworm ’Ullo John! Gotta New Motor?
It’s garish, ridiculous and chaotic in all the best ways, with our full-throttle host delivering one did-I-just-see-that? image after another – none wilder than the skit he performs with a mouthful of vegetables – and some choice gags, too, like the one imagining The Iron Lady as a Marvel movie. Happy to report after the success of Kent-Walters Live!!!, death very much becomes him.