Legislate That! poking fun at PC safety
Legislate That! An OSH-approved, tick-the-box, PC Production. By Karla Haronga with Spontaneous for Te Pu¯ anga Whakaari Productions, back of Bayley’s Real Estate Building, Manchester St, Feilding March 16 to 25.
Caution tape, cones, fluoro vests, ducting and audience marshalls set the scene for this 60-minute comic interlude.
Live sketch comedy is a rare beast in Manawatu, since the demise of Massey University capping revues.
With most contemporary comic energies being poured into stand-up, Legislate That! reintroduces troupe comedy satire, in a family-friendly format that explores the lighter side of a frustratingly bureaucratic, supersafe cotton wool coddled society.
In a non-theatre venue that used to be a gym, a play originally scripted for secondary students to perform as part of the New Zealand Theatre Federation One Act Play Festival in 2008, gets the Spontaneous treatment from the team of Palmerston North improvisers.
Led by improv veteran Alan Dingley, and accompanied on the keyboard by 11-year-old Ella Revell, the troupe get to play netball with an invisible ball, because throwing balls inside is dangerous.
Office workers get injured while taking their mandatory work-station group micro-pause exercises, and a breastfeeding mother is embarrassed by a cafe’s overly zealous and intrusive privacy concerns.
One of the best skits of the night saw the school lunch police ridding kids’ lunchboxes of anything containing nuts, sugar, or food.
However, as a long-standing theatrical health and safety inspector, certain aspects of the show appalled. None of the performers wore steel-cap footwear or hard hats.
There were no earmuffs in evidence, or any stop-go, laugh-don’t laugh signs to prevent inappropriate audience reactions.
Nor were there seatbelts to keep the audience secure in case the satire sped out of control and crashed.
Good fun, and ripe for extension, this sort of revue style comedy should definitely be encouraged.