Barking in Essex, Wyndham's Theatre, review "OH, I "ATE Shakespeare," drawls Sheila Hancock's Emmie in Clive Exton's Barking in Essex. All them thees and thous and talking like a c---. Making little kids learn all that rubbish. Time enough for learning a lot of miserable rubbish when you're my age. The actress seldom gets to play baddies and she makes the most of the foul-mouthed matriarch of an old gangster family. Alas, for all her efforts, this comedy - the last to be written by Exton before his death in 2007 - is still a tiring, strangely dated, affair. The pity of it is that Miss Hancock heads a superb ensemble - Lee Evans as her son, Keeley Hawes as his moll, and Karl Johnson as a decrepit hit man. They do their best, but they are patently working with criminally unfunny material. Comedies also, by and large, should not end bloodily and violently, as this one does. Poor Miss Hancock. She should not have to appear in such miserable rubbish at her age.