The Librarians - A Very Serious Comedy at Pleasance Courtyard Review
Plumstanton Library is not having a good week. The Head Librarian has been felled by collapsing shelving in the Agatha Christie section, his replacement is a disgraced ex-civil servant, and an inspector is en route to decide whether the whole building gets sold off for luxury flats. It's a set-up with real farce pedigree, and Cabbage Productions - riding high off the sell-out success of Spy Movie: The Play! - attack it with the frantic, ensemble-driven energy you'd expect from a company with Mischief Theatre in its bloodline.
When it works, it really works. The lights cut out on cue, the disconnected phone gag pays off beautifully, and the increasingly desperate reshuffling of books to disguise empty shelves is the show at its best: physical comedy in service of an actual idea, namely the quiet indignity of a public institution performing health for its assessors. The cast are uniformly game, hitting their marks with clockwork precision, and the new Assistant Head and the work experience kid are particular delights.
The trouble is the script can't quite decide what it wants us to feel. Billed as Fawlty Towers meets The Thick of It, it delivers the chaos of the former without the bite of the latter. The characters are drawn in broad strokes, the satire gestures at library closures and municipal decay without ever landing a punch, and - crucially for a show about saving a beloved community space - the staff are rendered so uniformly useless that it's hard to root for their rescue. The joke hit rate is decent rather than dazzling, and the misses are frequent enough to notice
An hour of amiable, energetic silliness, then, from a company clearly capable of more. The library might just be worth saving. The script needs a stricter editor, or at least a librarian who knows where anything is.
The Librarians: A Very Serious Comedy is playing at Pleasance Two in Pleasance Courtyard until August 31st.
★★★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
