Theatre

The final round of Camden Fringe Festiva review. What a great year

Alan Hindle | Wednesday 1 September, 2010 11:05

Photo from Bad Musical

Pinter’s People
Harold had been knocking out these little sketches since 1959, but it was Bill Bailey who compiled them, pick a pack of pint-sized Pinters, into a revue in 2007. The long pauses and hint menace are still there, obviously briefer and less threatening, but in balance the absurdity is heightened. These skits are less Caretaker and more Monty Python. Apparently when Bailey’s show was torn apart by critics over its crude acting. Maybe the critics didn’t understand it was sketch comedy. This current staging from Highly Strung Theatre Company manages to compress layers of subtext and throwaway jokes in between the already rich writing. Fred Gordon was especially fun to watch, with his sullen, unhappy little stormcloud face that can suddenly erupt into goofy smiles and desperate confusion, or all of these at the same time. The sketches are arranged in the order they were written, with music from that time used to set the scene, or at least the era.

The only sketch that jarred was the last, the least subtle piece from 2002, called Press Conference. Possibly because it wears its meaning on its sleeve like an armband, or possibly because the acting descends into barking “comedic hilarity” it loses the grace of the other skits, and the jokes are easy. Funny, accurate, but easy.

Durge
Dishes defy gravity in the sink, the bathroom is too toxic even for cockroaches, the carpet has been devoured and replaced by deep-pile mold and the windows are permanently shrouded with blankets to keep sunshine from burning up the semi-vampires inside existing on cigarettes and cheesepuffs.

Ah, the post-uni flat.

In Durge six friends spend their days hanging, scraping pennies for tobacco and watching Sesame Street. Festner, who hasn’t slept in weeks, is driving them all as crazy as he is. As a play it’s fairly pointless, with huge, glaring holes and questions that are never resolved, or even addressed. Why does everybody tolerate Festner and his anti-social ineptness? Why would anybody suddenly want sex with him? Why do the people who don’t actually live in this shit hole come round every day to suffer? True, students and post-students often find themselves living with total freaks, but the reasons why this happens would have been more interesting than simply providing a chance to discuss the qualities of crazy glue.

Writer/director Craig Peters claims in the programme notes he was inspired by Quintin Tarantino to write the script that was in his head, rather than what he thought the world expected of him. And the show does have the feel of a live action indie film- lots of swearing, rants about pop-culture and facts gleaned from magazines. Frankly, plays that aspire to be films should just get on with it. Durge has a script, a well-rehearsed cast, is set in a filthy flat and would cost about £5 to film and edit on a laptop. Shoot, burn and mail out DVDs. Get yourselves into the festivals, people.

Spade of Damocles
It’s the 23rd century and mankind has fled the Earth, driven out by the dolphins and their watery stooges. Judas Zero lives on the moon now, fodder for the mining operations of the corporations. Head replaced with an aluminum foil box, a hand with a metal crab claw, and other organs difficult to detect in a public room, he is more machine than man, but he clings to his humanity. He has traveled to the past to warn us that the source of the future world’s misery lies in the present. And now, here’s a song!

The singer/songwriter/cyborg that is Judas Zero is hard to pin down. The man is clever and funny, but doesn’t seem really able to play the guitar, and so nervous I worried for him. It takes courage to go on stage, and even more when a performer is clearly terrified. But while there was a lot of good material Spade of Damocles it was presented in a fearful, halfhearted, shrugging way. In comedy acts involving guitars, despite an audience assuming the instrument is a prop, most such performers are actually outstanding players, with music capable of standing on its own. Damocles doesn’t have that. On the other hand, Zero was so nervous, it’s possible he scaled down the music on the night so he could concentrate on keeping cool.

Judas. Firstly, ignore critics (including me) (we’re all shitheads) (brackets are fun!) be cool and relax. The show has legs. For now. Until the Corporation chops them off and replaces them with treads.

Romeo and Juliet
The tale of two very young lovers torn apart by their warring families ends tragically through a combination of misunderstanding and the lamentable availability of poison for persons under the age of 18 in the 16th century. In Shakespeare’s time the female parts were played by boys as women weren’t allowed on stage. Get Over It Production’s all-female cast reverses that, and it works fine. Women can be fucking bastards as well, so all the male belligerence of Capulet and Montegue, Tybalt and Mercutio still makes sense. In a way, it’s a drawback that the actors play the men the way they imagine men would act, because it does lend a false note. Why couldn’t the characters have simply been women? The biological issues of Juliet’s dad being a women aren’t as relevant to the play as the believability of the character.

Get Over It’s R&J fizzes with ideas, and a standout performances from Paula Benson as Nurse. However, the text is treated so casually it was often impossible to follow. Lines are tossed out, slurred, given no emphasis at all. Mercutio, an important character, is played by Irena Grgona- I’m going to probably make a mistake here and say she’s Polish- with a strong accent. Which is fine, but it means extra attention must be paid towards diction. Instead, Romeo’s best friend is an outrageous Marlene Dietrich-type, with delivery so playful it’s unintelligible. The show is blessed by a smouldering Romeo in Velenzia Spearpoint, a fragile Juliet in Sonia Kamel, and the hilarious Benson. As an experiment it works and justifies the company’s mandate. As a play it suffers from lack of rigour.

Bad Musical
I love eating my words. They’re not tasty, have no nutritional value and produce more gas than a thousand head of cattle in a hot air balloon. But when I am wrong about a show it makes me so happy I want to sing! From both ends! Bad Musical put me off with their programme blurb telling me not to come. Fortunately word of mouth convinced me I might be missing out on something.

Bad Musical, takes every miserable cliché saturating and sometimes suffocating London’s and New York’s theatre scenes, and spins out the best bad musical of them all. A small town lad from the north leaves his racist, sexist, homophobic, small-minded parents happily killing each other to head for London to become, as all boys dream, a banker. Cue music.

The cast are amazing, relentlessly funny, and at least one is capable of filling a small inflatable pool with sprayed spittle for the kids on a hot summer’s afternoon. My lungs have callouses on them from laughing, my slapped thighs are showing exposed bone, and my belly is full of bloating, bacteria-rich words. The songs are surprisingly tuneful and delivered with a suspiciously high degree of skill, suggesting these guys actually know what goes into a decent melody. Spoofing every songfest that ever tripped the boards, Bad Musical winds up creating a show every bit as good.

But in a good way.

wekillpimps.com
Two women, Justine and Beverley, have holed up in a former nuclear bomb shelter in Essex. A sort of B-list A Team, they kill pimps for money, the rights of women in the sex industry, and the moral high ground. The first hit was almost an accident, but as time went on they became thorough professionals, racking up 20 notches on their gun hilts. Now one has gone wrong, and in a Reservoirish Dog fashion they’ve gone to ground in grandad’s country bunker. Justine is a hardened, gleeful killer with ADD, who can only focus on the next kill. Bev is the brains of the operation, but lately she has also developed a conscience- a bad quality in an assassin.

I went to see this show mostly because I was terrified of the woman on the poster. Justine, as portrayed by Amy Butterworth, is a stunted child, but in her eyes there is a genuine murderousness. The performances, by Butterworth and Jennie Fox, are believable. The situation is an interesting one, and a play, especially a Fringe play, doesn’t need to be morally responsible. Hell, for a Fringe play it’s almost better to be a seething pool of amoral filth. What’s fun about morality? Yet for some reason the show never set alight for me. The fight scene was as realistic as a fight scene can be, I guess, on a small stage. However- and this is something that got me quite angry at the cast- YOU NEVER POINT A GUN AT THE AUDIENCE. I don’t care if it’s supposed to be edgy.

This is another play that might have been better as a movie, with an expanded cast and a chance to see the characters meet and grow together, rather than being thrown together by nothing more than a shared desire for justice.

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