Tales from the windy city
video of him speaking, speaking while his mini-me signs, and, video off, doing both at once – no mean feat.
The very personal stories are funny – which helps when you’re in the Comedy section of the Fringe Guide – but also fascinating, especially for those of us who don’t have deaf people, and professional translators, in the family. It’s interesting to hear about how sign language differs around the world, how recently BSL was recognised, how hard it is to enjoy TV soft porn when your auntie’s signing in the corner of the screen...
Keeping up to speed with a recorded version of himself is a new kind of timing problem for a comic, but likeable Scot Bradshaw manages it beautifully – what could seem just a gimmick becomes a tool giving insight into not just one man’s family, but the wider world.
One in six of us will lose our sense of hearing. Deaf Comedy Fam proves it doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of humour. MARTIN GRAY Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJJJ As a bed-wetting, Ocdsuffering, fart-valorising son of New Orleans, Sean Patton envisions himself as a superhero, the secrets of success visited upon him by an enigmatic stranger. He has known true love but, to his disgust, it’s been between his unflappable father and disciplinarian mother. Rebutting a crucial myth about his native city, the American embraces the voodoo wisdom of Cajun caricature for a supernatural epilogue, the culmination of a magical realist aesthesis that’s gently wafted through his lyrical hour. Even when he’s been bouncing on the spot portraying a furiously ejaculating penis.
Indeed, from some of the basest ingredients, this supremely gifted anecdotalist stirs together a rich, satisfying gumbo that fills you up on laughter even while subtly readying you for a gut-groan of emotion.
Patton not only admits his quirks but owns them, assuming superiority without ever appearing like he’s affecting a persona. You believe all the little tics he ascribes to his obsessive compulsive disorder, the origins of which he can trace back to a seemingly innocuous fart joke made by his dad. Winningly, he maintains he has no truck with superstition, dismissing it as “diet OCD”, before identifying the reporting error at Christ’s Last Supper that has caused all of the world’s evils.
You’re more than happy to imagine his nonsensical, ritualised oddness has a direct line to God and is all that’s keeping the storms of chaos at bay.
The formative moments in his tale – the drug-induced, hallucinatory figure that he and his teenage friends seemingly conjured into being to change their lives; the embarrassing aftermath of the loss of his virginity, the terrible accident that followed; and the desperation of his father as their world came crashing in – these are so finely sketched but with so little showiness that it’s only afterwards you truly appreciate Patton’s playfulness
0 Sean Patton – bed-wetting, Ocd-suffering son of New Orleans with cause and effect. A stunning debut from a deceptively mesmeric talent, I found myself watching converted into flats brings back powerful memories of wonderful childhood and teenage days spent in the back stalls, watching the greatest movies of the late 20th century; and for most of its length, Differ’s play is just a friendly, jokey nostalgia trip, part cultural, part social, as the two men send each other up rotten while reminiscing about the sleazy manager, and the all-powerful box office manageress who doubled as interval ice-cream girl.
In the end, something darker intrudes, as we realise that ghosts are only memories with an exceptional grip on our emotions. And although Differ’s play is mostly the lightest of stuff, it offers Gray and Stott a range of wonderful opportunities for the inspired, slightly surreal byplay that is the trademark of their stage relationship, and of what’s fast becoming one rapt between fits of eruptive laughter. JAY RICHARDSON of those priceless comic partnerships, never to be missed. JOYCE MCMILLAN ZOO Southside (Venue 82) JJ Aspiring child actress Annie achieves the dream – a major role in a continuing drama – but her pushy though well-meaning parents fail to spot their daughter’s decline when she succumbs to the pressures of being a child star in an adult world.
We Need to Talk About Bobby (Off Eastenders) does a fairly credible job of teasing out those relationships, but the melodramatic ending is, perhaps appropriately, strictly soap opera. FIONA SHEPHERD