Listing towards the quirky
drastically stripped away, the parallels to the protagonist of his Gothic source material unmistakable.
In stark contrast to his alterego’s descent into scrambling justification for his vanity project, Hammerhead itself is tight as a drum, with Morpurgo’s exceptional performance precisionplugged into a matrix of audio and visual story beats, plot twists and ridiculous tangents, the scaffolding on which his fictional self has erected his monumental folly crashing down in a beautifully executed demolition.
Some touches are inspired, from the indentured servitude he’s driven himself to in order to fund this mammoth undertaking, which includes writing an almost fully realised musical for a chartered surveyor, to the corners he’s had to cut, his publicity poster a vision of hilarious pennypinching desperation.
Dazzling in its scope and creativity, Hammerhead wreaks happy mischief on virtually every cliché of the auteur ego-trip. Marvellous. JAY RICHARDSON Summerhall (Venue 26) JJJJ As we wait for the theatre to open, we are handed pencil and paper and asked to make a list. Today’s topic is “Favourite childhood toys”. This is one of the major ways that theatre company FANSHEN collect material for their show, which is entirely created from crowd-sourced lists.
Lists are everywhere in today’s culture. Books list places to see before we die, websites use listicles as a substitute for journalism. FANSHEN draw out the more whimsical tendencies of listmaking to create their show, which contains a mixture of scripted content and improvised material which is new each time it is performed.
The first secret to making a show from lists is to choose sufficiently quirky topics
0 The audience’s favourite childhood toys get an airing in fanshen’s list-based variety show which will elicit funny, poignant, personal ansers: “Questions I’m afraid to ask my parents”; “Places I’d hide a body”; “People I like more than they like me”; “Things I’d do if I knew no one would find out” (run my neighbour over, join the Libdems); “Things I inherited from my mum” (costume jewellery, Thomas Hardy novels, anxiety).
The three performers, Clare Dunn, Shireen Mala and Delme Thomas, who helped to make the show along with directors Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe, deliver the material expressively, whether registering sympathy, surprise or, occasionally, confusion. That said, lists are not inherently theatrical, and they work hard to vary the presentation style, including a bit of improvised song uncertain at times, similarly when delving into the great American song book and elsewhere, a slight raggedness emerging in the otherwise warm delivery for Elton John’s Your Song, while the old Nat King Cole hit Nature Boy, and the Gershwin classic Summertime again triggered that soaring falsetto.
He closed on a wistful note, with Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees, once again delivered with engaging heart. JIM GILCHRIST and dance and a quiz for the audience.
The result is something approaching a list-based variety show, which rarely strikes a wrong note but does not always flow easily from one item to the next. With such rich material, it would be worth exploring the possibility of a greater narrative arc. SUSAN MANSFIELD There’s little in the way of horizon-broadening insight to be gleaned but he’s an amiable guide, interspersing anecdotes with pop history factoids to bulk out tales of him crashing a dog sled and seeing the Northern Lights.
Elsewhere, he paints an entertaining picture of the social awkwardness that saw him come a cropper in Top Man, his drastic action against his neighbour’s wind chimes, and the flapjack obsession that’s become one of his defining characteristics.
Appreciating the whimsical vengeance that ordinary Norwegians visited upon mass murderer Anders Breivik, Smith also likes to spin real scenarios into gently offbeat ones, his fiancée’s coeliac disease ensuring that he goes to extreme lengths just to eat normal bread. Upbeat to the extent of jauntiness, Smith won’t burden you with anything weighty or provocative, with Snowflake a breezily delivered, consistently amusing string of routines. JAY RICHARDSON