There’s a brilliant moment in the BBC comedy Upstart Crow when Shakespeare – played by David Mitchell – defends his work as a comic writer by saying, ‘If you do your research my stuff is actually really funny. It just requires lengthy explanation and copious footnotes’. In Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s latest novel, he seems to be making the case that all a Shakespearean comedy needs is contemporary language, a cast made up predominantly of primary school children, and to get rid of the central baddy and the silly weddings at the end.
As far as I’m concerned, anything that can get a reader to laugh while teaching them a bit about the bard is good news, and The Blockbusters! is another triumph from Britain’s Children’s Laureate.
If there is a villain in The Blockbusters!, we never see them, but we do have an authority figure who poses a challenge in the lives of our heroes. Namely, the landlord who decides to evict Rafa, his older brother Cillian, and their mother from their home at the very start of the novel. This prompts the boys’ mum to leave them with their largely incompetent uncle while she goes off to mysteriously attempt to solve their housing crisis.
At his new school, Rafa and his nurture group get taken on a school trip to the Shakespeare North Playhouse by their bardolatrous and badass teacher, Ms Greenwood. When it turns out that they’re not allowed in because the world’s most famous child actress, BB, is filming her new movie in which she plays Shakespeare’s sister, it seems like the story will be over before it gets started, but thanks to Rafa’s uncanny physical resemblance to BB and a recent vacancy for a body double, the gang get to go on set.
When BB realises that Rafa makes a convincing BB, it gives her the chance to see if she can really play a boy – by donning Rafa’s beanie and taking off into Merseyside. So, in a classic comedy of role-reversal and mistaken identity, Rafa now has to convince the world that he is BB, who is due to appear at The Oscars the following evening.
We get exotic locations, rapid plot developments, comic coincidences, dramatic irony, and hair-breadth avoidance of exposure by the bucketload, and we even get a smattering of the supernatural in a twist that I certainly did not see coming. But above all, we get a great story with a core of characters that are lovable and deftly drawn, and a happy ending that is warmly satisfying.
Plus if it leads to even one child being able to tell me just a single convention of Shakespearean comedy when they get into my classroom in the future, I’ll have even more to thank Frank Cottrell-Boyce for than just another great read.
