Camden Fringe 2011 - Week 1

A little bit of context before we bite into apple of amateur reviewing: my attention this August is split between the Camden Fringe and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - the former of which I'm spending as a volunteer at the lovely Etcetera Theatre for two weeks, and the latter of which I'm spending ten days at as a (very giddy) punter. What this means is that I will be seeing a lot of theatre and comedy this month and will probably not want to see anything after September 1st for the next DECADE*.

What this also means is that I'm going to try and get back into actually using this blog, lucky for you cats. So. Let's go. What have I been watching at the Etcetera this week?

*Anyone who knows me knows this is a big fat greasy pig of a lie.

Helen Keen: Robot Woman of the Future
Keen is one of my favourite kinds of people: she's passionate about what she loves in a way that means you can't help but be swept along with her. Her show about rocket science last year was like that, as was this preview of a work-in-progress Edinburgh show (that she's taking up there in 2012) about her relationship with the future. Of course, it was rough around the edges, the links were haphazard, and it didn't really have a clear sense of direction, but it was still very enjoyable. Besides, a preview is allowed to be an utter shambles, so it doesn't matter that it wasn't perfect - that's the point. She's definitely got the charm and the ideas to make it work by the time she does finish it, anyway, and that's what counts.

The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife
I don't like saying I have favourites, but if I did this would definitely be one of them. The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife by KUDASTS is a simple enough tale - wife and husband fight! Husband leaves! Eventually they realise they were made for each other! They get back together in the end! Even then they still fight! But they love each other so it's okay! - made special by use of music (continuous Spanish guitar - and ukulele - playing live in the background; occasional bursts of song at key points; all very beautiful) and use of set and space (a cloth circle laid down on the stage, within which the action happens, like a bullring). The result was a captivating and atmospheric performance with pleasing Spanish touches, and the acting was mostly spot-on. My only real criticism is that there was TOO MUCH SHOUTING; volume could have been played around with a little more, not only for effect but also to prevent the audience from developing a collective headache.

Alternative
As anyone who has paid attention to anything Ben Goldacre's ever done will know, homeopathy is (to put it lightly) nonsense, and that's what this comedy play - focusing on the trials and tribulations of a man with mysterious stomach pains and the effect this has on his interpersonal relationships - is about. While it was quietly and consistently funny, as well as, to be honest, quite sweet, it had its flaws: you're never entirely sure whether the aim is to educate audiences about the negative side of homeopathy or simply to preach to the converted; the reveal about his illness was somewhat unconvincing; there ended up being a fairly large, unexplained plothole regarding the character's strange blood results; and, in the end, the play seemed cynical about both "conventional" and "alternative" medicine, which I don't think was the point. However, it was well acted and well-staged, so it's enjoyable enough, but it's not perfect.

Permission to Cry
So here's a play about a female MP who loses her mind after her secret journalist girlfriend gets trampled to death by a police horse during a rally. While relevant, heartbreaking to watch and convincingly acted, yes, it fell down on the staging front - it needed to either be very minimalist or very... not, but instead it sat uncomfortably in between, with lighting changes that didn't really add to the play in the way that might have been intended. Also, though it was interesting to see the whole business of potential MP private life scandals being explored from a different light, the play ended a little too abruptly - a story should really go somewhere, whether you leave the end ambiguous or not, and sadly, this didn't.

Walk Like a Black Man
This comedy monologue about a half-black half-Indian man's race-related confusion was charming enough, and it did bring some nice laughs about an interesting topic, but I feel that it suffered (like Permission to Cry) from a lack of any real conclusion: a forty-minute monologue that ends up just going round in circles is not really the most satisfying thing to watch. There were also some pacing problems that I'm guessing were down primarily to nerves, but ultimately the show wasn't unbearable - it was just missing some really substance, some 'oomph' to make it really worthwhile.

The Next Best Man
To be honest, this try-out for a possible new radio sitcom left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The plot of this 'episode' was so convoluted and strange - I need to find a new best man because the other one has died! Also I slept with his widow after the funeral! Also I may or may not have got my best friend's girl-of-his-dreams (who is a stereotypical Eastern European immigrant dressed as a gypsy, har har fucking har) pregnant even though I've had a vasectomy! Or maybe I didn't have a vasectomy! Also I'm generally just a charmless bastard! Argh! - that I couldn't believe a word of it, and the characters were all idiots in a way that just really isn't entertaining. In terms of humour, many of the jokes were mean and obvious, poking fun at the vulnerable and quite heavily misogynistic in places in a way that would have been hard to get away with in the 70s, never mind now; there was also a lot of word-play that completely fell flat and pop-culture references that were neither relevant nor helpful. Also unhelpful was the use of ALL THE LIGHTS IN THE THEATRE, which was apparently to add to the feel of the action taking place in a cafe (you know, with those harsh flourescent lights, or something) - unnecessary because the set made it very clear that it was a cafe, no problem there, and because all it did was make it look like a stage with a lot of lights on it. Not great, all in all.

Once Upon A Sketch
Long story short: it started well. It really did. I found their job centre sketch quite funny the first time, as well as the character who turned up to trick-or-treat months in advance and responded to having this pointed out to him by just standing there and saying, "I'll wait." Anyway, I was enjoying myself, laughing away even though there were a few problems with lazy humour (like in their Pinocchio sketch, the punchline of which rested on there being two broomsticks instead of one - I'm sure you can fill in the blanks yourselves) and one character who was a very obvious rip-off of Catherine Tate's Nan - until about half-way through, when I realised this is all they've got. The recurring characters and jokes just recurred, they didn't develop in any way, and they seemed to have been relied upon so heavily that the stand-alone sketches were never as tight as they could have been. So like I said: it started well - it just ended up suffering from Little Britain syndrome.

The Forbidden Wardrobe
It's a silly little musical play about transvestites with catchy songs that didn't take itself seriously at all, which is just what I needed and just what I like. I actually saw it on both of the nights it was on because I enjoyed it so much. The jokes were spot-on, the songs were catchy, the characters were endearing (and, in the case of the Elvis-type character who took on several different roles - Jehovah's Witness, bastard boss-type and ex-boyfriend -, a TRUE HERO) and the shoehorned-in political message - support the Art's Council and don't vote Tory or Lib Dem next election, basically - at the end was dealt with in such a pleasingly-lighthearted way that it wasn't at all annoying in the way it could have been. Probably the highlight of my week, this one.


So there we are. Roll on week two!

"A contraceptive misadventure."

(Copied from another blog. Let's get the ball rolling with a bit of a general post.)

Yesterday morning, I got up early to see two editions of Rufus Hound's Teenage Diaries being recorded at the Drill Hall. Sheila Hancock read from the diary she'd kept during her six-week holiday in France as a fourteen year old girl, telling us about some incredibly life-changing moments which I found rather heart-warming. Victoria Coren then told us about her teenage obsessions with boys and her weight, as well as the strange way in which she, at the time, dismissed the media career of her adolescence as commonplace and boring. I think if I'd known the teenage Victoria Coren, I'd've fucking loathed her, but I would have probably still tried it on with her.

Much later on in the day, I trundled off to Battersea Arts Centre to see a preview of Daniel Kitson's Edinburgh show, "It's Always Right Now Until It's Later". It was, in a word, mind-blowing. I have no idea what I thought Kitson would be like (this was my first time seeing him perform), but I'm glad I approached him with a mind empty of expectations or I might have been disappointed.

If you're planning on seeing Kitson's Edinburgh show at some point and don't want to be 'spoiled', I suggest you scroll to the end of this post, where I start talking vaguely about some telly.


With this show, he was taking a story-telling approach, but it wasn't really comedy. It wasn't a funny story; it was a story with some jokes. I got the feeling that his main aim really wasn't to make everyone piss themselves with laughter.

Let me try to explain. In this show, he tells the stories of two people, and the only way in which they are in any way connected is by one, insignificant moment where they brushed each other on a bus. The show is about, well, life: how even the most insignificant of events can mean something to someone, even if in the grand scheme of things it means absolutely nothing. Obviously, what with it being a preview (he'd told us he only finished writing the show yesterday morning), it was a bit messy in places where he forgot his words or ran out of steam and had to consult his script. Having said that, it was still marvellously, cleverly put together - cross-cutting between the two timelines with seemingly-irrelevant but interesting tangents - and I'm sure that when he finally can deliver it properly for Edinburgh it will be much less of a slog.

A note on the set, which I fucking adored: the stage was completely plain expect for the several light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling at various heights. They were all lit throughout the show, but whenever Kitson zoned in on a particular moment (he told the stories by jumping back and forth between the timelines of each character, jumping backwards and forwards in their lives, focusing on a different, important moment with every scene change to paint clearer pictures of these people), one particular light-blub would shine brighter to symbolise said moment's sudden significance. When he wasn't sitting on the chair, reading from the script the bits he couldn't quite deliver from memory, he would walk to the part of the stage with the brightest light-blub and talk at it, like a comedian might talk to an audience member in the front row.

If you're seeing him in Edinburgh, you will not be disappointed, but you may leave the venue with the feeling I had last night - a sort of heavy melancholy I couldn't really understand. The show makes you think.

'Spoilers' end here.


Today I have a day-off from live comedy, so I've had the chance to catch up on Monday's Rev and yesterday's That Mitchell & Webb Look.

A note on the former: I think it is becoming one of my favourite sitcoms of all time. It's definitely not laugh-out-loud funny, but that's because it doesn't want to be. Instead, it's cosy, and it's sweet, and the characters seem like real people with real lives (as opposed to the larger-than-life types typical of, say, The Vicar of Dibley). It's wonderful.

A note on the latter: do you remember Series 3, boys? Do you? What happened? Why have you gone back to being of a similar quality to the first two serieseseseses? Obviously I'm adoring the After the Event sketches, and this week's final sketch (once it stopped being a little boring) was delightfully bleak, but the rest of it was just a bit 'meh'. Why are you still running with Hennimore? And why did you use a red button sketch from a previous week in this week's show? I don't understand.