Theatre

A whole bunch of Camden Fringe festival reviews

Alan Hindle | Tuesday 10 August, 2010 13:56

The Camden Fringe Festival takes place until the 29th of August.

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City Cant
Three weeks before the Fringe was due to open, Andy and JJJ dropped out to do more important things. Did they take their frenetic insight into the world of investment banking to The City and make a million pounds? Did they tie towels and bedsheets around their necks and start prowling allies and rooftops looking for crime to stop? Perhaps they drew straws to see which would start taking estrogen and have a womb implanted to make children together? Crop dusting the Antarctic? Weeding the oceans? Giving confidence-boosting make-overs to clouds? Whatever it was, it was very important.

Precious Things
A women struggles to mount an exhibition of her great uncle’s paintings, despite his international reputation as Hitler’s favourite artist and Nazi. Her brother, visiting from American with his pregnant wife, disagrees with her dream. The gallery assistant, meanwhile has some sort of secret agenda, as well as a creepy butler complex. Do we need to separate an artist’s life from their work rather than cloud it with the details of historical reality? You won’t find out from this show. Despite raising all sorts of interesting possibilities Precious Things investigates none. Not only does fail to look into its own subject matter, the play raises internal questions and then avoids them, too. Why does the sister need the brother’s involvement so much? Why is the assistant doing… whatever it is he’s doing? Why does this exhibition need to happen, besides being “important”, the artist a “genius”, his works being “so beautiful”? At nearly an hour and a half it’s 45 minutes before the word Nazi appears. You can’t depend on an audience remembering the programme blurb to keep in mind something is going to happen eventually. It’s a full hour before we have dramatic tension of any kind, and the final explosion of emotion wouldn’t dent a box of tissues. They had Nazis! Estranged siblings! A really creepy villain who made great coffee! To My Little Theatre Company: even a quiet play needs dynamism and pacing. At a Fringe you need just a little bit more.

Not Just a Suitcase
Cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. Maybe the City Cant boys stole their suitcase, filled it with money and went on a business excursion to the Columbian rainforest, buying exotic frogs and using them as tiny poisonous mules to transport coke back to the UK? Excuse me sir, did you pack these frogs yourself? Are these frogs harbouring drugs? I’m sure I don’t know, officer, why don’t you pick it up and have a look inside? Argh! My heart! And then in the confusion they split up, the Cant boys abscond to their flat in Canada Water, the frogs hop to Eel Island to hang with friends. They meet later to conclude their important business.

Big Baby
During the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment, ignorant but loving peasants John and Janet have a beautiful baby together. He’s everything poor but happy parents could desire, plus gigantic and able to talk, levitate and glow. Naturally they want the best for their child, and when they have a chance to move to London to provide an education and the first steps to his becoming a proper gentleman they jump at it. London, however, is full of mad, unscrupulous characters, and not just at the educational institutions!

Written by Brendan Murray, Big Baby is a gloriously overblown cautionary tale, in the same vein as Voltaire and Swift. Ruthless black humour spawns grotesque monsters eating and shitting rationalism to its logical end- More rationalism. At first I didn’t know what to make of the Gogandmagogic performances, but once ensconced in this satiric realm I was enthralled by its speed, energy, joyous anger and limberness. Phil Bishop and Kate Tucker are brilliant, veering precariously along an arc of country naivety and urban wantonness. They are made to seem naturalistic, however, by the outrageous and semi-gymnastic cavortings of Hayley Michaels as Everybody Elsie, both our narrator and the entire population of this wretched urban hell. Watching her snap between personas ties your eyelids in knots.

A warning, however. Gunshot is used in this performance. Usually, in such a small acoustic space the gunmaster uses less powder so audiences aren’t deafened. These folks don’t hold back. As much as I think people should see this show, if you can’t take noise either stay away or be ready to plug your earholes so deep your fingers touch.

Even Greedy Bankers Deserve Freedom
A variation on the Tom Stoppard play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, an ex-banker, who helped trigger, or at least worsen, the recent economic meltdown is holed up in a mental institution faking madness to avoid being killed by his victims outside. His sister and a journalist struggle to tell his true story, though for different reasons. Meanwhile the slightly mad psychiatrist and the accountant’s very mad roommate debate his true state of mind and the possibility there really is an invisible band playing in an insane asylum.

The original Stoppard play featured a symphony onstage. This version just has two guitars and an empty, unused drum kit. Performances aside, which ranged from frenetic to uncertain, the biggest problem with this show is its untapped musical possibilities. At least a joke was thrown in, at the moment the hero is about to break into song, that this was not going to be allowed to turn into a musical. What? Why the hell not? Is there a hole on the stage the drum kit is covering up? There are flashes of sharp humour to alleviate the ponderous earnestness, but the show never addresses the question why we should have sympathy for a banker avoiding his responsibilities. If they had at least bashed out some tunes it wouldn’t have mattered so much.

Maddy Nebraska: Nearly the Biggest Jew is North London
MC Nebraska has changed this show at the last minute, swapping the ongoing stand-up comedy show she presents regularly in Belsize Park. Which happens, Fringe programmes are made long in advance of what the shows evolve into. Maddy is a congenial host and very funny, though her act, focused on being a single girl not quite Jewish enough made me wish all the more I could be seeing the show she was going to do, and hopefully will in the near future. Suzi Ruffell was also a laugh, a breathy, overexcited lesbian with terrific charisma. The third comic, Adam Tempest, needs work done on his act, but he has this run to do tuning. All three are of the “hey, who’s ever had this happen to them before?” school, but while both Nebraska and Ruffell are also great storytellers, with gifts for improv and the knack for bouncing ideas off the audience, Tempest is still struggling not to let the audience have to supply him with ideas when he dries up. A good show, but I definitely want to see Nearly now, and Ruffell has at least a few full-sized productions of her own in her.

Life is Short, Have an Affair
Not really a cabaret as three short and rather sweet little plays that seem to be about people fighting for the last few drops of love left in the world. A girl grows into an old woman bickering with her unicorn; two rivals meet to host a celebratory funeral for their shared love; a nature documentarist and a porn film producer join forces, and other other stuff, to make a film about grumpy panda bears mating in the only way possible at a Fringe. Filthily. French Canadian Amélie Murdock and New Yorker Kate Chavez are students at the London International Performing Arts School, as seemed most of the audience that night, but they are both already accomplished entertainers. Murdock struggles with her English, but she’s having a ball, so that’s all right. The two together are a hoot, though the sketches between playwright Lila Rose Kaplan’s playlets need to be tightened, scrapped, or invested in as much as the main stories. Not a hilarious show, not an out-and-out comedy, but something subtler and more interesting.

This article was edited on 12 August 2010: Life Is Short, Have an Affair co-creator Amélie Murdoch was initially identified as French.

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