Wed Aug 13 2008 Dan Geary
Elizabeth and Raleigh in Late but Live at the Udderbelly Cowbarn

It'd be hard, and perhaps unfair, to talk about Stewart Lee's follow-up to 2007's historical comedy Johnson & Boswell without mentioning 'the other' alternative Elizabethan comedy. But for all its defects, one thing is certain – though Simon Munnery's portrayal of Elizabeth I is quite different from Miranda Richardson's in Blackadder II, it's still as good, if not better.

Written by Lee, this two-hander between Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh (played by comedian Miles Jupp) involves Raleigh's attempts to persuade the Virgin Queen to marry him, who in turn reckons he's just a self-serving charlatan and intends to chop off his head. Munnery's regal entrance is marvellous to behold – walking straight down the middle of the auditorium, over chairs and audience members, in an enormous, bedraggled vaudevillian frightwig/greasepaint ensemble. 'The queen only walks in straight lines!' explains Sir Walter to the audience. 'You may laugh, but you do so with soiled underpants,' she informs them.

Munnery effectively ropes the monarch into his repertoire of twisted, angry loners. His Elizabeth is an embittered lush – the missing of cues and bumping into furniture somehow adding to the effect – out to punish the creepy, maid-shagging Sir Walter.

Jupp is less effective as Raleigh, although, it should be said, he has less to work with. The pace and tone is strangely flat throughout, except at the end, where we witness a mist-wreathed portrayal of Raleigh's naval adventures, both eerie and ridiculous (the pair wearing enormous ships on their heads), and during Munnery's final, doom-laden monologue – a bleak surveillance of the realm from the windows of a train up to Edinburgh – clearly taking the piss out of Derek Jarman's film Jubilee.

Munnery is a great, if limited, actor, but he can't carry the show by himself. The talent behind this is of the first pedigree, but it's not quite comedic enough to be great comedy, nor quite dramatic enough to be great drama. History buffs will love it, though.’