22 – 25 October
Midweek at Bristol Old Vic and the house is lively: film buffs, theatre regulars, a few quietly mouthing the lines. Richard Marsh’s one-man Yippee Ki Yay retells Die Hard in rhyming verse and folds a love story into it. On paper, it sounds twee; in the room, it’s quick, charming, and properly funny.
Marsh rattles through the Nakatomi Plaza saga with a poet’s engine and a fan’s eye for detail. He lands the iconic beats cleanly; air vents, broken glass, the long fall; but the joy is in the texture. The rhyme gives the plot a fresh snap; the knowing asides skewer continuity gaffes and eighties bravado without sourness. His Hans Gruber is the epitome of a crowd-pleaser, the Alan Rickman cadence earning its own round of applause, and his McClane has the right mix of swagger, deadpan and grit. Around them he conjures the film’s glorious supporting chaos: Holly’s corporate grace, Karl’s shampoo-ad hair and feral fury, coke-dusted executives and news anchors with delusions of grandeur. Each appears in a blink, absurd and affectionate, like postcards from a cult classic fever dream.
The staging is nimble. Director Hal Chambers keeps the rhythm brisk and the tone balanced so the parody never tips into smirk. Emma Webb’s movement turns shoot-outs and showdowns into compact physical comedy; a scrap with a teddy bear is unexpectedly convincing, a “Russian ballet” scuffle knowingly ridiculous. Minimal props become running gags: a watering can conjures a skyscraper waterfall, a Ferrero Rocher becomes pure cinematic decadence. Robbie Butler’s lighting and Ben Hudson’s sound design do the heavy cinematic lifting, switching us from Christmas party to crisis with a flicker and a bass thud.
What lifts the piece beyond a clever conceit is the second thread: Marsh’s own relationship, told in interleaved flashbacks. Wedding-day sweetness, new babies, the slow drift that makes running time feel longer at home than in the cinema. He uses Die Hard as a language for love and for the loss of easy laughter, a ritual that binds two people until it doesn’t. The stakes deepen, not through plot twist, but through recognition. By the time he edges toward rewriting what the film means for them, the room is with him.
The jokes come thick and fast: a German who sounds like Prince Harry, an army of immaculately coiffed henchmen, and a knowing nod to the strange, bulletproof logic of 80s action films. Yet the show stays generous. Marsh is an earnest, likeable performer with excellent timing, and he never sneers at the thing he loves. That sincerity is disarming.
By the final run of couplets the audience is whooping and stamping. Naturally you leave wanting to rewatch Die Hard, but also thinking about the films we build our lives around, and how they help us make sense of each other. A smart, sweet, very British crowd-pleaser that earns its heart.
★★★★☆ Tilly Marshall, 23 October 2025
Photography credit: Rod Penn
