[2012046] Dr Brown Befrdfgth

Philip Burgers @ The Tuxedo Cat – Yellow Room

9:45pm, Sat 25 Feb 2012

I bumped into Philip Burgers in the TuxCat foyer earlier in the evening; it’s the first time we’d chatted this year, and – after the greetings et al – he asked what I was seeing; “Telia, then you,” I said, “but please don’t pick on me this year. I want to see the show, not be in it… for once.” “Oh,” he said, wide-eyed and honest, “you should come later. I’m running on empty.”

“Running on empty?” I queried. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve got nothing,” he admitted. “It’s all improv.”

And off he dashed to prep his show.

The net result of this conversation is that I was almost giddy with anticipation, but tempered with confusion. After all, last year I thought that he was “improvising” some audience abuse, when it turned out to be a fundamental part of his (then) current show… but now he’s telling me he’s really got nothing? I was salivating at the uncertainty of seeing what he would deliver.

Into the Yellow Room… and it’s pretty much full. I’m perched in the third row, dead centre, and the crowd around me is bubbling with anticipation. Dr Brown has generated quite the reputation in the last couple of years, and most of the people here are repeat customers, comparing notes from the performances they’d previously seen. And I must admit that there’s a secret thrill listening in on other people’s descriptions knowing that there’s a pretty good chance that they will describe a show during which I was on stage.

The house lights drop, and Dr Brown appears through the red curtains at the back of the stage, wearing a black robe and headdress, only his eyes visible… but that’s expressive enough as he glares at a few premature chucklers. He drags the curtains back, exposing the junk-littered backstage area, then takes position at the far wall, some three or four metres behind the stage; he starts jogging towards the audience – two short steps – then turns and jogs back to the wall. Three steps this time, return, four steps… soon he’s running up to the front row of the audience, turning, and running back. There’s a nervous wave of laughter in the crowd now, wondering what Brown’s next move would be…

Well, it was obvious, really. He ran through the crowd, spotting the odd empty seat and leaping (or stumbling) his way to the back of the room as the audience either shuffled seats to open his path or, trapped, shrunk in place to at least allow access to their arm-rests. There’s much laughter… and then a couple of late-comers arrive. Brown gives them the glare, returns the curtains to their original position, and repeats the entire exercise again.

We’re all laughing – if it’s not the expression in his eyes, it’s the ludicrous physicality of his scrambling.

Headdress exposing his entire face now, he attempts to mime the act of nailing himself to a cross – his clowning is coming to the fore, and his actions are preposterous. He starts riding an imaginary bike; reaching for the bell, his eyes draw a response from the audience – “ring ring!” we all start yelling, and before long he’s got us well-trained with other action/noise pairs – “honk honk” we’ll blare, “hiiiii!”, “bye!”, “woah!”, and “ahhh!” all join the vocabulary, with a nice “gonggggg” to wrap up the segment.

Brown trots out a bit of a song, before offering the audience the opportunity for the audience to choose their own ending: we had to sit in a particular front-row seat and ask him to perform… well, anything, before being banished. The first few suggestions raised some incredulous eyebrows from both Brown and the audience before later requests played into Brown’s hands, allowing him to milk more laughs; with requests petering out, I took the hot-seat and made a simple request: “Take a bow.”

The resulting applause was thunderous, rapturous. I was very happy with that :)

The woman after me – the final request of the night – asked him to resurrect his “pornographic puppet” sketch (as seen last year), which – once again – brought the house down. And from the back of the room – where all previous requestors had been banished – I laughed and cheered with the rest of them.

And Burgers’ words kept echoing in my head: “I’ve got nothing.”

Here was a man who, by his own admission, had nothing to work with other than his imagination and a metric fuckton of comedic clowning talent… and still managed to keep a roomful of people delirious with laughter for an hour. I mentally made a note to myself to pencil in a later show, because I was insanely curious as to what this “nothing” would develop into… because the raw “nothing” was pretty bloody special indeed.

[2012045] Live on Air with Poet Laureate Telia Nevile

Telia Nevile @ The Tuxedo Cat – Blue Room

8:45pm, Sat 25 Feb 2012

There’s no point denying that I fell completely in love with Telia Nevile last year, and to be warmly greeted by the t-shirt-(Rimbaud Built My Hotrod)-and-pyjama-bottoms-clad Nevile as I scuttled into the Blue Room was an unexpected delight.

As was the opening tune of Raise Your Hands as a “Live on Air” sign flickered with life at the side of the stage. Nevile bounds onto the stage, grabs her microphone, and drags us into her bedroom pirate radio station, which she uses to broadcast her poetry and thoughts to the world.

The poetry itself feels a lot more balanced than that in For Whom the Bell Tolls; there’s a much more consistent flow to the work. Whilst Nevile’s previous effort was charming because of the occasionally awkward reaches for a rhyme, Live on Air smooths those bumps out and replaces them with silky stanzas that constantly impress with her wordplay. The humour quotient seems to have been lifted, too – her weather report (of her soul) is a bittersweet delight, and the jazz-esque “deep” piece suitably lush.

And then she lets loose with her “grammar grindcore” bit… and I’m completely, utterly, head-over-heels-edly falling in love all over again. Her dedication to the tall blonde guy across the street, recited as she gazed longingly into the audience, was wonderfully stirring (in more ways than one), and her West Wing slash-fic that detailed – and I do mean detailed – Josh and Toby’s War Room dalliance was a work of art.

The eighties-lyrics closing piece was just icing on the cake, really – but by that stage I was already grinning from ear to ear, and was blindingly smitten yet again. I absolutely adored Live on Air: with smart poetry, a charming host, and an infectious nod-and-a-wink, what’s not to love?

[2012044] Tom Ballard – Doing Stuff

Tom Ballard @ Rhino Room – Upstairs

7:15pm, Sat 25 Feb 2012

I’m waiting quietly in the downstairs Rhino Room bar, when an old classmate from an acting class I took last year came over to me. We start chatting about how much she loves the Fringe, and how – when she had media credentials one year – she went nuts and saw a massive twenty-three shows. I showed her my Media badge (acquired purely for Fringe Club fawning, I might add) and mentioned that this was my forty-fourth show this year… she laughed me off, thinking I was joking.

Some people, eh!

When we finally go upstairs, it’s a pretty full room, and I wind up sitting at the back on one of the stools chatting with a woman who was clearly gearing up for a big night out, and was laying down a pretty solid foundation of alcohol to booze on. The fun chat was interrupted when Tom Bollard stepped onstage after a very brief self-introduction.

Now, I’ve seen Bollard a couple of times before as part of the Feast Festival, and every time he impressed the hell out of me – whilst he’s relatively young, he still puts a very mature slant on his comedy with largely relationship-based material. But for this Rhino Room Fringe audience, Ballard reduces the amount of content that focusses on his own sexuality and replaces it with political banter.

And that’s a bit of a disappointment, really… because, not only is Ballard’s material devoted to his (gay celebrity) relationships bloody brilliant – and noticeable by its absence – but the political observations in their place are… well, not great. Pretty pedestrian, actually. And when he’s resorting to poking fun at the physical appearance of our politicians… well, I’m starting to think that he’s wasting his talent.

Luckily, he’s “helped” out by my aforementioned ex-classmate, who chimes in from the second row that Amanda Vanstone is pretty fat. Ballard looks at her quizzically for a moment before affirming her statement: yes, indeed, she is rather large, and what does that make her electorate – fat sympathisers? Then, en-route to his worst sex story ever (one word: stoma), he throws in a bit of work addressing the idea that political conservatives find homosexuality (and same-sex marriage) to be disgusting: consider, he proposes, the Ruddocks having sex. Or Bert and Patti Newton.

And that rapid-fire banter is pretty good, as is his wrap-up: doing stuff is important, he says, as long as the positive stuff you do outweighs the apathy towards the stuff you don’t do. And that’s a nice note to end on, but I still walked away pretty disappointed with this Ballard set; his Feast gigs have been much, much more enjoyable.

[2012043] Clown Lights Stage

Alice Mary Cooper @ The Tuxedo Cat – Cat Bowl

6:00pm, Sat 25 Feb 2012

When I attempted to see Christophe’s show, I strolled (or, more accurately, scooted – I was running slightly late) into the Cat Bowl to see Christophe poking around on the tech’s desk, and Alice Mary Cooper, clad only in underwear, cleaning some dark stuff off her limbs. I found it creepily difficult to look away, if only because I wanted to know what she had smeared on herself; I assured her that Clown Lights Stage was on The Shortlist, and she promised me I’d learn the secrets to her grubbiness.

So I was a bit keen to see this show. The weirdest things can trigger interest, right?

Anyway: there’s a small (let’s call it “intimate”) crowd in for this evening’s show, and in their infinite wisdom they’ve decided to fill from the back row. Not me; straight down the front. You know, to give the Alice a friendly face in the crowd. And when Alice arrives, prim and official, she’s rushing to deliver a lecture: she’s got a series of slides on her chosen topic of… something frightfully academic-sounding already set up on the projector.

But Alice has forgotten her notes; she leaves us to go collect them. We see her scurry off, then hear the screeching of tyres, a crash – then nothing.

I turn back around to see where Alice had gone… and see Ms Felicity Clown (Alice, clad in baggy white underwear with a red clown’s nose) creeping nervously forward, carrying Alice’s bag. She explains that Alice has been hit by a blue car, and that Clown will be filling in for her… and so begins a quite bizarre lecture.

You see, Clown struggles (as do the audience) to even comprehend what Alice’s slides are about, and fumbles about in an attempt to convey her perceived meaning using the contents of Alice’s bag. It’s not long before Nutella is smeared on her arms and legs, followed by a comical attempt to lick the spread off the limbs. The slide that read “Test the limits of naturalism on stage by sitting and eating a full English breakfast” results in Clown extracting a Twinings English Breakfast teabag and eating it, before expunging the chewed up mass into Alice’s water (though I was disappointed to miss out on the tampon variation that Jane witnessed). And the quest for the lost sweeties was a bloody good laugh, too.

A lot of Clown Lights Stage reminded me of Dr Brown’s antics; absurdist explorations into everyday objects. Alice Mary Cooper has a wonderful sense of timing, and somehow manages to make Clown a character you want to barrack for; Clown’s misplaced-confidence is utterly charming, and is spiced up with a trace of whimsy.

The audience was barely into double-figures this evening, and we were unevenly split into two halves of the room: myself and another girl sitting behind me were the Noisy Side, laughing and cheering Clown on, and the Other Side, who were… ummm… frugal with their vocal approval. Which must have been tough – especially, as Alice told me later, as there were a number of reviewers in that night. And I hope they saw the Noisy Side having a good time… because we certainly did.

[2012042] Rough Trade

The Violent Romantics @ Holden Street Theatres – The Studio

4:00pm, Sat 25 Feb 2012

I’d seen The Violent Romantics talk about their show at the Festival Fishbowl, and was left with conflicted expectations: the content of the show sounded really interesting, but the cast… they were so young. But the promise of staged ultra-violence – as well as a ticket already in hand – lured me into The Studio, to sit with a crowd of about twenty in front of a stage framed with cardboard boxes.

“Cool,” I thought to myself, “they must be there to cushion falls. This is going to be awesome.”

Four contestants – Stud, Tarry, Viktor, and new girl Dee – introduce themselves by holding up their “score cards”: names, level, and body count are all detailed in a perfunctory statistical layout. They’re all competing in an underground round-robin tournament that owes more than a little to Fight Club, goaded into battle by the manipulative Madam X, who films their bouts for an online audience… Tubs the cleaner adds levity to the experience.

As Madam X prods the emotional weak-spots of the contestants, accentuating conflict with fabrications – twisting Stud and Viktor’s relationship, for example, or allowing Tubs a chance to be “promoted” from cleaner to fighter (though why he would want to do so is beyond me). The fights themselves tend to appear almost as tightly choreographed dance pieces, with lifts and throws testing the performers; the rest of the performance is very shouty dialogue. The denouement – a noisy rabble of miscarriage and blood and hatred – is representative of the rest of the show…

…and I say that because it’s confused. Rough Trade can’t seem to decide whether it’s social commentary or fantasy narrative, theatrical fighting or dance; there’s all sorts of crippled characters on display, but the attempts to fill in their backstory – to create some sort of justification for why they’re at this Fight Club – feel flimsy and ill-considered. And there’s too many times when I found myself asking “why?”: the pregnant contestant. Tubs’ promotion. Madam X’s motivation. Stud’s… well, anything.

To be fair, the dancing is actually really quite dynamic and exciting – sure, it doesn’t create a realistic rendition of the violence that it represents, but nor is it supposed to. The problem is that these dances are simply too few and far between, and separated by periods of “why?” The idea of having characters softly chattering in the background needs re-visiting, too – it adds distraction, not ambience.

In all, Rough Trade reeks of an immature approach with both eyes on spectacle, with little regard for anything else… and I’m not sure that the spectacle itself is sufficient to warrant it.

[2012041] Wee Andy [FringeTIX]

Tumult in the Clouds @ Holden Street Theatres – The Studio

2:30pm, Sat 25 Feb 2012

It’s to be expected that any discussion of Wee Andy is going to occur in conjunction with Fleeto – the two are inexorably linked by the attack on (the eponymous, in this case) Wee Andy at the top of both shows. But I found the two pieces to be markedly different, despite the numerous links and crossovers between them, both in content and – most importantly – in tone.

Wee Andy, as the title would suggest, follows Wee Andy after his Glasgow Smile attack, with the action taking place in his hospital. Narrated by the Surgeon (listed in the programme as “Police Officer”) who has tended to the results of too many of these attacks, much of the performance focusses on Andy’s Mother’s shock at the attack, followed by the realisation of what her son’s life has subsequently become: visibly branded by that act of violence, his options in later life become extremely limited.

Andy’s friend Mackie – Fleeto‘s protagonist – makes a brief appearance, but Kenzie has a much more significant role in the play after he is admitted to the hospital – he’s still the same evil fuck that he was before, but the frustrated – almost animalistic crippled howls – struggle as he loses more and more of his influence is incredibly scary… and compelling.

Pauline Knowles’ performance as Andy’s Mother is magnificent – easily one of the best performances I’ve seen this year. Andy Clark again imparts a restrained weariness in his Surgeon, despite an explosive scene with Neil Leiper’s Kenzie that really turns the performance on its head. But because Mother and Surgeon form a lot of the focus of Wee Andy, the language is a lot more adult – restrained, circumspect – especially compared to Fleeto. And that, in turn, removes a lot of dynamism from the show.

It’s also a less overtly violent piece – certainly the language, being restricted to that of the Surgeon and Andy’s Mother, is nowhere near as profane or violent. The actual acts of violence are similarly handled through separated characters enacting the physical movements – an effective ploy. But the real violence in the piece is communicated by the Surgeon – detailed descriptions of the natures of the attacks upon Andy and Kenzie made me squirm in my seat. And the string used to “scar” Andy is particularly effective.

But, despite all the quality inherent in Wee Andy, it really didn’t grab me as tightly as Fleeto did. At times it seems overtly preachy, almost lecturing on society’s need to pay more attention to the underclasses… a message that was more subtly presented in Fleeto. And, after the performance, I spent the best part of twenty minutes with Holden Street staff discussing the preferred order of seeing the shows. I reckon I stumbled into them in the correct order, Fleeto then Wee Andy; I think it helps to see Mackie’s story in full before the minor role he plays in Wee Andy. And I really enjoyed seeing Kenzie suffer in this show, especially after discovering the truth behind Andy’s attack… a truly bitter twist in the tail.

But then I start wondering: how would I have felt in Fleeto if I knew all there was to learn in Wee Andy? Unfortunately, that’s something that I just cannot experience now… but it does make for deliciously deep and ponderous contemplation.

[2012040] The Snowdroppers

The Snowdroppers @ The Vagabond

11:30pm, Fri 24 Feb 2012

After leaving Tim McMillan earlier than I would’ve liked, I pushed through the seething sozzled mass in The Garden to The Vagabond. The line was, as I suspected, not yet moving; after all, it was only 11:49pm. I was expecting movement by 11:50.

Not so much.

Around midnight the queue started lurching forward. I’m now immensely irritated, because (a) I retrospectively know I could’ve hung around Tim McMillan for an extra 20 minutes, and (b) I’ve been standing behind a group of drunken fucktards, unable to escape the banal inanity they’ve been slurring to each other whilst they commandeered plastic chairs and created their own little seated area in the middle of the line. Still, they all head into the middle of The Vagabond, and I head to the back: the seating and elevated view is very welcome. I’m feeling dead-set resigned on having an awful time, and I take a moment to quieten myself down: remember, I told myself, this could be the show that changes your life. Open up a bit.

The Snowdroppers take to the stage. The crowd in the pit of The Vagabond cheer. “How the fuck ya going?” yells their pretty front-man. And they launch into a rumbling, snare-dominated, more rock than rockabilly opener. And the next song sounds pretty much the same, just with a little tempo variation. By the time they’re halfway through the first chorus of their new song, Devil’s In The Details, I’m becoming bored by its monotony.

The drums are way too hot, and that snare is so sharp that it’s starting to poke me in the eye. Guitar is well restrained lower in the mix, and alternates between some great chugalug and piercing leads. The bass is magnificent – fat and dirty and delicious. The rhythm section are pretty frugal with their movements, mostly rooted to the spot; the front-man roves the front of the stage like a wild animal, hip-thrusting through his songs and occasionally playing banjo to increase the rockabilly feel. He exercises great crowd control – not that it’d take much to herd that crowd of drunk lemmings.

But when he issues a call to arms – “let’s try and get everyone laid this evening!” – well, I feel completely out-of-place. About 25 years out, actually.

There’s a few familiar musical motifs that permeate the songs, and – truth be told – if you could drop the drums a bit, there’s some great grooves to be had from The Snowdroppers. But, as the exodus from the twenty minute mark showed, they’re not for everyone… and the blatantly sexual intent in their performance was quite off-putting for me. Still, when I read the Guide précis back now, I really should have expected that.