The Lavender Hill Mob at Richmond Theatre

I have to address the elephant in the room first.

The Lavender Hill Mob concerns the robbery of gold being transferred from Royal Mint to Bank of England and this is a part of London that I know very well as both my sons live in flats in Cartwright Street which is part of the Royal Mint site (once owned by The Crown and now by People's Republic of China). So it annoyed me intensely when the play described the passage of the gold down Cartwright ROAD! An error it made twice. They also turned left into East Smithfield when they should have gone right.

It also annoys me a little that the play describes itself as a "side-splittingly funny, fast-paced comedy" when it is no such thing, and nor should it be.

But I'll begin at the beginning which was an email from the theatre announcing the show and being a fan of both the original story and the theatre I was quick to book and got my usual seat Dress Circle A25 for an extremely fair £22 thanks to my loyalty card.

I hoped for something that mimicked the mood of the film with amiable thieves gently committing an audacious crime and that is exactly what it was. The humour, like the action, was maintained at a constant level that was certainly high enough to be good entertainment but which never made the claims made for it in the publicity. There were a few obvious funny bits added to try and justify the "side-splitting" claim but these were too contrived and completely unnecessary, the play was doing fine without them.

The staging was a real positive with the story told as a retrospective with the people in the room playing out the various parts so, for example, we only met one of the actual criminals and the others were played by other people who also played other roles. It worked well.

If you liked the film of The Lavender Hill Mob then you would also like this stage version and should forgive it its occasional dalliance into slapstick. Getting that street name wrong still hurts though.