Right way to get it wrong
Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) JJJJ Zach and Viggo are two very very silly men. Zach is American, wears black, seems eager to please. Viggo is Norwegian wears red, is slightly mysterious.
This year both our comedy superheroes are doing solo shows – and their double act is a bit less structured and choreographed than before.
But loose works very well for Zach and Viggo. The slightest gesture or the merest look from either is guaranteed to make the audience laugh. What they do is ridiculously silly, childish and simple – but brilliantly funny.
Viggo leaps out from the side of the stage. Zach looks at him in a funny way. Viggo looks back at him. Viggo jumps back into the wings. Everyone laughs.
Viggo jumps back out waving a cucumber. Everyone laughs. He jumps back out waving a bigger cucumber. Everyone laughs even more.
At the beginning of the show Zach and Viggo give us an introduction to their technique. Walking out wearing high viz vests and with clipboards they try out a variety of moves, funny voices and noises. Then they look at the audience, look at each other and make notes on the clipboards. Was that funny, or not funny? Even if the thing itself wasn’t funny saying “not funny” and making a note of it makes it funny.
Like all the best double acts, they have an incredible connection with each other – constantly making each other laugh, playing tricks, flirting, shooting messages to each other with a glance.
Their energy never flags, their watchful eyes upon the audience never fail and they are faultlessly and unrelentingly joyous.
There are no jokes. Viggo tries to tell a joke about a cucumber but never gets to the end of it. They don’t need jokes. Sometimes a cucumber is enough. CLAIRE SMITH Heroes @ Monkey Barrel (Venue 515) JJJJJ If you are noise and sweat averse, Phil Nichol’s shows are always going to be challenging for you, but do persevere with this one. It is worth every decibel of the noise and every millilitre of the sweat. Fans of Nichol’s other work will be delighted to hear that the show also contains acting. This show feels like all grown up Phil. Philosophical Phil. And crazily funny Phil. It is his most properly personal show ever, beautifully crafted, without a single comedy stitch that is not neat and secure.
Of course there is the Nicholian raging and rampaging around the place, but now the sound and fury is not just strutting and fretting. He takes the idea of being wrong and leads it from the flat earthers he meets online, through a sweet grammatical detour to a consideration of facts and our mutating relationship with them.
He despairs gloriously at the lack of any hierarchy of facts now. Then, after taking us to his own family’s born-again Christian beliefs, we take a comedy scree run down through fundamentalism and fun with Anne Robinson, to his brother Andrew. And the car crash that left him in a coma. This is the first of a trio of stories through which Nichol examines as refugees can find ways of ghosting past fortified borders when their need or desire is great.
One young woman has courageously fled from unspeakable horror in Syria to the bland safety of Dartford, while another is moving the other way, chased deep into a newfound religious belief by her shame at having intimate photos shared on the internet; now, she wants people who search for her online to feel horror at her actions in the caliphate rather than cruel amusement.
Elsewhere, a young man newly freed from prison is subtly conditioned by his fellows’ encouragement not to forget the sense of safety his Islamic brothers provided while he was inside, as an anonymous ‘Muslim Banksy’ ‘being wrong’ and his problem with, even occasionally, accepting that inevitable part of being human. The stories present breathcatching scenarios of life and death and pain and God. They are deeply personal stories that speak to universal conundrums. This is a show that makes daubs religious buildings in Syria as a means of defiance. Sponsored by the antiextremist organisation Quilliam – from whose research it draws resonant first-hand experience of the subject matter – playwright Nazish Khan and director Jessica Lazar’s piece, a combination of monologue and dialogue scenes, has a thoughtful, lyrical quality offering by turns shards of hope and passages of gut-wrenching insight. DAVID POLLOCK Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) JJJ It’s estimated that two million people in the UK are fighting you laugh and think while you are watching, and then wakes you up in the night for to laugh and think again.
Complexity and nuance have never been shouted so sweatily. Yet complex and nuanced this show is. It asks genuine questions about right and wrong and an addiction. That’s an alarming statistic, but when you take into account the number of things we can be addicted to – from gambling to chat rooms, from alcohol to drugs – it’s not like we are low on options.
More tellingly, we’re hardwired to pursue pleasure. As Worklight Theatre explains in this snappy and engaging piece of documentary theatre directed by Katharina Reinthaller, resisting the rush of dopamine goes against our instincts.
That’s the compelling argument of the show, co-written by Joe Sellman-leava and Michael Woodman, which punctuates each of its case studies with rapid-fire descriptions of the body’s chemical processes. The case it makes in its patchwork the huge, tangled spaces in between. The last story is so beautiful it silences the room. Just hoping it is true because Nichol has just pointed out that he was off his face on mushrooms at the time so his memory might be hazy. KATE COPSTICK of song, direct address and dramatised scenes is that addiction is not a symptom of moral weakness but, in fact, an illness.
It’s a knotty subject that everyone from entry-level Facebook obsessives to those whose lives are being destroyed can relate to.
Fix treats the material with a lively blend of seriousness and theatricality, even if the cosiness of the cabaret format sits uneasily with the extremity of what’s being described.
It also leaves us uncertain where to channel our anger by underplaying its political hand, brushing too casually past an economic system that cynically exploits our own human weaknesses. MARK FISHER There’s a naked Barbie doll attacking a naked Ken. Now Ken is being nailed to a cross: he’s not Ken, he’s Jesus! And pinned to his two planks of wood, he soars through the sky like a rocket. In the middle of a jam-packed set – full of toys, clothes and brica-brac – Flemish clowns Mireille and Mathieu create surreal sketches that constantly backfire, giving them a literal slap in the face (or pretty much anywhere else). If there was a game called Performers against Props, they’d have made it.
Boxing babies, a malfunctioning puppet theatre, a “dog” who gets zapped back on his ever-shortening lead: it’s the kind of slapstick that, despite (or perhaps because of ) the odd bit of swearing and toy disfigurement, children would find hilarious.
Yet creator-performers Kathleen Wijnen and Erik Bassier subvert everyday objects so skilfully, it’s delightfully silly entertainment for all ages. A decision to repeat one of the best routines until the audience get sick of it, in an audacious attempt to undermine their own show, treads a fine line between being tedium and brilliance. It would also be great to see what the pair could do with a bigger, single story, rather than episodic sketches, fun as these are. SALLY STOTT Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (Venue 170) JJ Technical issues are unimportant, first day nerves in a newbie forgivable but is it too much to expect a comic to know his show before asking for money? Hari seems like a very nice, recently married man with a delivery which is sweet and gentle going on ineffectual. His show is mainly autobiography (so, strange he forgot so much of it) shored up with five “illusions to shatter” in the achievement of happiness, as defined by Mo Gawdat’s Solve for Happy. I fear Hari is labouring under another illusion: that he has an hour worth sitting through. KATE COPSTICK