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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2004 Reviews (36)Zoo-oid Fight Night Experience Zoo-oid Fight Night Experience is a gutsy and provocative piece of work from Para-Active, a company renowned for pushing at the boundaries of performance and challenging their audiences. Based in the most multi-ethnic borough in Britain, they are aptly placed to take on the cultural identity crisis running rampant in the psyche of this island race. Zoo-oid Fight Night Experience is challenging because it perplexes. It is capable of shocking across the board from Rudyard Kipling readers, through garden-gnome afficionados to liberal Guardian readers. This is not one of those political plays where the demarcations between right and wrong are made distinct for an audience of well-heeled patrons of the arts ensconced in cosy passivity in a darkened auditorium. Zoo-oid is a platform performance with an ironic MC, a DJ and a host of characters one might erroneosly assume to have escaped from the pages of a political comic strip. Fat Yank McGringo does battle with the 'corporate suicide bomber' and Chemical K-Ali ('the original spice girl') teams up with a sexy, sword-wielding samurai (wow) to defeat Captain Ali Hook ('by special permission of the Home Office'). Ram Illeganathan Asylumseekeram stumbles into the ring with Geoff the Disabled Policeman. These are the super heroes and bad-guys of Marvel Comics made relevant for an ironic, postmodern 21st century. This show reminds me of the work of our great political theatre company 7:84 in their hey-day. There is audience participation, music and superb physicality; the material takes us to the edge and back again. It is refreshing to see some genuinely ground-breaking political theatre out there in an age of apathy. And if it flummoxes, and refuses to fit neatly into conceptual boxes, well, I think that's the whole point. It is apposite, but sad to note that the us-and-them thrust of earlier political theatre was naive in the extreme. Para-Active never quite lets us off the hook, even when we are cheering for a contestant or laughing out loud. Just when we are feeling safe, confident in the knowledge that we are on the winning side, along with the good guys, booing the baddies, they force us to realise that nothing in this contemporary world-wide crisis is quite as simple as black and white, rich and poor, north and south. Put your convictions in your pocket with your ticket stub and prepare to be provoked. Jackie Fletcher For the Love of Money As a student at Queen Margaret University who has at least a passing familiarity with most of the actors who perform in Laura Sharpe's new one-act, I enjoyed this piece. There's something about seeing acquaintances on stage that brings a heightened sense of humour to any comical production. That said, audience members without this familiarity may not find this piece as entertaining. The play, which began as a one-act, benefits in the second half from the intervention of actors and the director who, according to the programme, helped the play "become real." The story takes far too long to get on its feet, and the "what happens when ordinary folks get rich quick" plot doesn't really shed new light on an old situation. There are moments of witty - even hysterical - dialogue (Sharpe's skill at, for example, the weedy teen dialogue between two adolescents flush with lottery winnings and hormones stands out), but one suspects this is based more on the actors' delivery than on the strength of the words themselves. Each actor is strongest in their main role, though those who play secondary parts as well make the best of the situations. Stand-out performances come from Phillip Weddell as Darren and Matthew McVarish as Douglas; both regularly had audience members in fits. Rachel Lynn Brody Half Marathon Roxane's new diet - given to her by her boss Rebecca - works. It's easy. All you have to do is eat half of everything: half a meal, half a bar of chocolate, and so on. So she decides to apply it to everything in her life, which is in a bit of a mess because of a disastrous relationship. It's an interesting idea, but plays need more than that: without good, believable characters they become simply exercises in playing with ideas, and the characters must be there in the text for the acttors to build upon. Why does Roxanne take this half-baked (sorry! bad pun) idea to such an extreme that it destroys her life? Actress Jennifer Pick makes a pretty goood stab at showing the character's mental degeneration with nothing more to help her than the fact that the breakdown happens, and she is well supported by the rest of the talented young cast (none over the age of twenty), but not so well by the play. Philip Holyman shows promise as a writer. Much of the dialogue is well-observed, although I have to say that the scenes with lesbian boss Rebecca did not always ring true. |
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