If You Want Blood
The Vaudevillains @ Worldsend Hotel (upstairs)
11:00pm, Sat 26 Feb 2011
We arrive at the Worldsend a little early… and try our hand at sneaking into the still-running So You Think You Can Get F#%ked Up. Negotiating our way through the velvety curtains, we’re surprised to find two seats in the second row. Seb returns to the stage in his Carlo Cabana role, and – true to form – flicks both of his shoes at my head. How he spotted me in the crowd I’ll never know.
And, sadly, that was the highlight of If You Want Blood for me… the fact that it got me to see a snippet of someone else’s show.
Even though Seb’s show finished a little late, the queue snaking downstairs and around the many corners of the Worldsend were left waiting for ages before entry; no-one else in the crowd seemed to mind, however, and I suspect that’s because this was largely a collection of friends. There was certainly a lot of familiar banter between people in the line and cast members, who periodically cruised the line promising “another ten minutes.” About four or five times. Eventually, around midnight, we were let in… and, completely against our nature, we took a seat at a cocktail table at the back of the room – just behind an optimistic video camera.
It turns out that If You Want Blood is an old-fashioned freak show. There’s self-stapling and razor-blade swallowing. There’s some bizarre pantomime featuring midas-touch plants. There’s a quite decent hoops performance. And the backing band is pretty good.
But, despite the over-the-top nouveau-gore dressing of the production, there’s absolutely no sense of coherency. It’s as if a collection of half-decent freaks coagulated one evening and said “let’s chuck on a show.” It’s not like I was expecting plot or anything, but… it was just one little act following another.
There were a whole bunch of people in that room that loved If You Want Blood. I was not one of them.