Early on, only feet and lower legs are visible – that’s when one of them pretends to piddle: big joke.No, they don’t only stamp. Why have those metal bars and those platforms all over the place if you can’t crash at them with sticks, bounce heavy balls, etc.? And in case that isn’t enough, everywhere you look there are microphones to ensure maximum effect from every footfall, every slap, every bang. Plus, at any moment when the action briefly pauses, there are percussionists working away like mad things.What you have to admire is the sheer energy of the performers. The show lasts some 80 minutes nonstop, often with all of them hard at it, and they seem just as vigorous at the end, even pouring water over the stage and dancing away in that.I nearly forgot to mention that the show has a new title this year, Tap Dogs Rebooted, and that three women have been privileged to join the cast. This is their 10th visit to Britain in the nine years since they started, and they have built an audience as noisy as themselves, shouting, cheering, whistling, even a bit of good old-fashioned clapping.But however hard they try, 1,600-odd spectators (it’s a full house, of course) can scarcely match the racket created by six men on stage They are unequalled in rowdiness. Naturally they have a lot of help; the production credits list not only a designer but music production and engineering, a sound designer, a sound consultant and a sound engineer.Even before the show started, the music was coming over so loud that one elderly gent went to an attendant and asked for it to be turned down No luck; he was simply in the wrong place.

On this they stand, run, climb, sometimes with legs astride on two separate bits And they stamp, stamp, stamp. To tap something is to hit it lightly, and they would not know the word lightly if it came up and bludgeoned them. What they do is so heavy, so aggressive, that it needs a new name. Crash dancing, bang dancing, wallop dancing.
The “dogs” bit of their title is apt enough, however, because they do sit up and beg for applause, at the end of every number and rather often in the middle too. Down to the front, or just stand where you are, face the audience, grin and wait for it They get it, too. Every female character over the writer’s age (27 in fact, and not 17, as an unprepared listener might suspect) is described as a “lady”, while the tired expression “potty mouth” is unaccountably assumed to have comedic qualities.

Often, clich?appear, such as “stars coming from the sky”.Then there’s the weak plotting, a total inability to set a scene without laborious physical descriptions and the continual reversion to the phrase “See, what had happened was … ” to shift the action.When Les Dawson was penning stuff this predictable and sub-literate, he intended to frustrate his audience. But at best this might make for a one-hour special on BBC’s radio station 6 Music, never to be repeated. Take along a book, and perhaps a pillow, if you’ve bought tickets already.

It’s a struggle to explain all the ways in which this dreadful piece sucks For a start there’s the paucity of the language. (Cynics might suggest that Kitson’s lisp has something to do with this easily pronounceable choice of moniker.)This tale of two lost souls fated to meet after a series of moderately amusing misunderstandings will be instantly familiar to anyone who has read the works of proper authors such as Martin Millar or that Japanese master of the wistful, Haruki Murakami, (which come much cheaper and last longer). Though a brilliant, abrasive stand-up, who refreshingly never resorts to emotional neediness, as a writer of fiction Kitson may well become the first comedian to have his scribblings rejected by a publishing house.A Made-Up Story follows the misadventures of Dora, another of the accessible dream figures the comic loves to imagine, and Beth, actually male, although “his parents felt that such an attractive name shouldn’t remain gender specific”. Every few years the world of entertainment throws up a fabulous disaster of such awesome proportions that all those lucky enough to see it can share the memory with friends and strangers for years.