Richard Herring is considering revisiting his greatest folly, his preoccupation with the notorious Russian monk Rasputin, by reviving one of his biggest flops, the 1993 Edinburgh Fringe play Ra-Ra-Rasputin.

The comic, who recently announced he is ending his RHLSTP podcast, has revealed that his management are nudging him towards bringing back his jukebox musical and playwriting debut, which explored the life of the notorious Russian monk through the songbook of German disco powerhouses Boney M.

Written as he and double act partner Stewart Lee were preparing to record Fist Of Fun for Radio One and two years before that show launched onto television, the play starred Herring as the mad monk and ‘lover of the Russian queen’, told as if he was the world’s first pop star and had written all Boney M’s songs. As he has pointed out, this was years before Mamma Mia or We Will Rock You had hit the  stage.

His co-stars were fellow Oxford Revue alumni Sally Phillips, who was becoming his girlfriend at the time, Ben Moor, Andrew Mackay and Clare de Vries, and it was directed by Toby Hulse, with Al Murray contributing ’drums and fx’.

According to Herring, Ra-Ra-Rasputin was championed by the Guardian’s comedy critic William Cook. But he failed to persuade his fellow Perrier Award judges of its greatness.

Writing in his Warming Up blog this week, Herring recalled that Cook had ‘raved about it to an unconvinced panel, who he managed to persuade to see it. They all turned up on a Monday afternoon when they were basically the only people in the audience and none of them laughed at anything. It was the only performance not propelled along by a happy, giddy crowd. It was like they had a point to prove to Cook and there’s nothing worse than an audience determined not to enjoy something.’

The comic, who lost weight and learned to dance for the show, admitted that it ‘was ramshackle (sometimes deliberately) and stupid (though hiding its cleverness) and not like anything that anyone else was doing. At the time nearly all comedians were doing stand-up or sketch shows (though those were unfashionable at this point) and comedy was the new rock and roll. It wasn’t the new 70s pop and I was not being edgy or cool.’

Herring also noted that Ra-Ra-Rasputin ’is one of those shows that more people claim to have seen than actually bought tickets’, adding that ’there were some clever undercurrents about celebrity and the royal family and the unreliability of the historical narrative’.

And although a sub-plot about the marriage of the then Prince Charles and Princess Diana ‘will no longer work, I think there’s stuff to say about what happens when the obscenely rich people have no regard for the poverty all round them and the way that celebrity corrupts men and how religion can be used to charm people, control people and cover your tracks.’

He has made several attempts at adapting it for television, including developing a 2012 BBC pilot. And he recalls ‘a vague memory that at one point Russell Brand was mooted to play Rasputin in the TV version, which would have been a little bit on the nose’.

And having chosen the monk as his Mastermind subject in 2010, he returned to him for his more serious 2014 play, I Killed Rasputin, which lost him an eye-watering £45,000 at that year’s Fringe.

Nevertheless, he has concluded that ’my memory of Ra-Ra Rasputin version one is that we had a lot of fun. We were young and working for no money (and there was a considerable amount of rehearsal as we had to learn songs and dance routines) and I was writing the show right up to the wire and two of us fell in love and we were doing something stupid and amazing.

‘It didn’t really matter that it bamboozled the Perrier committee. We conjured this hour of nonsense up out of nothing. It was exactly what the Fringe should be about.

’It would be different to do it again and strange. But as I say, I am thinking about it.’

- by Jay RIchardson