The ghost of Rossiter laughs on

RISING DAMP
(Lowry, to Saturday)

RISING DAMP is Eric Chappell’s masterpiece; a brilliantly funny TV sit-com made even better by central performances so good you might think it impossible to recreate what made it so special.

Think again: the actors in this four-handed non-PC trip down Memory Lane are about as good as impersonations get — and foremost among them is the wondrous Rigsby of Stephen Chapman.

Though in pictures the actor doesn’t bear much resemblance to the late Leonard Rossiter — the face is fuller, the body heavier — on stage the transformation is extraordinary, down to the suspicious sneer, the arched back, bodily tics and depressive energy.

He doesn’t have it all his own way: the Miss Jones of Amanda Hadingue is a pretty solid likeness for Frances de la Tour’s original, likewise Paul Morse’s innocent Alan a good reproduction of Richard Beckinsale.

The only one not channelling the original is Cornelius Macarthy as “African chief’s son” Philip — which is odd, or maybe not, because the show’s director is Don Warrington, who played Philip on TV.

This one is brasher and the voice louder than Warrington’s languid original. A fuller impersonation might have been rather creepy in rehearsals...

The show itself, reworked by Chappell, contains some of the choice content from the TV series — the love-wood episode, Rigsby’s over-consumption of tranquillisers and so on.

But the truth is that despite the brilliance of the impersonations and the easy laughs of the script, this mainly goes to prove just how good the original was. Rossiter’s manic energy was superbly caught on camera, the sweat on his brow mirroring the seedy desperation in his face, all turning to laughs in what was rather a sorry, lonely group of people.

This show, funny as it is, reveals its TV origins: scenes don’t quite flow with the grace and speed they did on screen and unlike the TV series, which had a beautifully-formed comic tale each week, this compiles choice elements without a big final payoff, just several smaller ones. The cast also has trouble being heard in the big theatre.

Even so, it’s a pleasure to revisit the greatest ITV comedy of the past 40 years. Which channel are the repeats on?