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Fringe 2007 Reviews (15)
NewsRevue
Canal Cafe Theatre
C Chambers Street
*****
London's longest running live comedy show, Canal Cafe Theatre's satirical
NewsRevue, brings another sold-out show to Edinburgh, consisting
of favourite sketches and songs from the past year.
In the stifling heat of the top floor of C after a twenty minute delay
starting, the packed audience saw a high energy show covering topics
as diverse as obesity, Blair's resignation, Paris Hilton's imprisonment,
CCTV, George Bush, the floods, cosmetic surgery, Life On Mars,
the Beckhams and much more.
The songs put new lyrics to well-known tunes to comment on events in
the news; Abba's Waterloo becomes Watching You for the
opening item on CCTV cameras, and there is a song about obesity called
Super Calorific Yes My Diet Is Atrocious. The lyrics are often
brilliantly clever, but there always seems to be one part that doesn't
quite fit or doesn't rhyme properly. There are sketches as well that
can run for several minutes or last for just a couple of lines, and
items are linked by quick one-liners in voice-over delivered in blackout.
There is a lot of real laugh-out-loud material, but you should also
expect to see at least a few items that make you cringe a bit, as they
push the boundaries of taste far further than anything on TV and, arguably,
occasionally step over them.
Performers Pippa Evans, Will Kenning, Emily Murphy and Ben Watson are
brilliant throughout, and Pete Smith returns as musical director on
the piano to keep the whole show moving.
The pace of the show is exhausting at times, but this allows them to
fit a huge number of gags into the hour. There are superb performances
and at its best it has some of the sharpest satirical comic writing
you could expect to see on stage.
David Chadderton
Aesop's Fables
by Michael Morpurgo
Scamp and Bristol Old Vic
Assembly @ George St
*****
Best-selling children's author and former Children's Laureate Michael
Morpurgo has adapted some of Aesop's Fables for print and now
for stage in this Bristol Old Vic production at the Assembly Rooms.
The show opens as the cast—two actors and a musician—arrive
on a small platform that floats slowly across the stage to the sound
of the accordion. With the aid of lots of props and bits of costume,
the trio tells a number of famous fables including The Miller's Son
and the Donkey', 'The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg', 'The Traveller
and the Bear', The Wind and the Sun' and 'The Hare and the Tortoise',
with 'The Wolf and the Shepherd's Son' told in instalments between the
others.
This is a brilliantly imaginative piece of theatre, performed superbly
by Chris Bianchi and Tom Wainwright with musician and composer Benji
Bower. The wonderful music is a constant backdrop to the melodic, rhythmic
speech as well as turning into full songs at some points. The sun sings
a real crooner's song, and the last time that the boy cries "wolf",
he does it in the form of a great jazz song. There is also a song that
opens and closes the show that weaves together the morals of all of
the tales as its lyric.
There are some magical transformations, such as the paper carrier bag
that becomes the goose, and the wheelbarrow that slowly becomes a donkey
with the aid of a few vocal sound effects, or even the tortoise, that
gradually becomes clear as Wainwright dons a green backpack and round
glasses, then unwraps his sandwiches from a handkerchief with an embroidered
'T' in the corner. The whole thing evolves quite slowly without rushing
the changes between the stories and not at the frantic pace that many
performers feel is necessary for a children's show, but it never for
a moment becomes even remotely dull.
Although it is billed as a children's show and there were plenty of
children in the audience, this show never talks down to its audience
and as a result is a wonderful piece of theatre for children or for
adults.
David Chadderton
Dracula
Black and White Rainbow
C Chambers Street
**
To create a sense of menace and bring a chill to the audience when
retelling such a well-known story as that of Bram Stoker's Dracula
needs convincing characters and a build-up of dramatic tension. Unfortunately
the latter is almost totally absent: the pace is genrally somewhat pedestrian
and, even when a scene manages to build up some tension, it is dissipated
because the scenes are often very short and the fade to blackout, the
coming and going of characters and the changing of furniture drop the
audience again. This is compounded by the fact that some of the characters
are not really fleshed out - a fault in the writing rather than the
performances.
There is also a strange confusion of period: whilst it seems (there
are not enough clues to be absolutely certain) that the production is
set in the novel's period, there is a dance sequence which, while it
is exciting and strange but totally at odds with the rest.
It is clearly a student production and so suffers from the perennial
problem that some of the actors are much too young for their roles,
which doesn't help us suspend our disbelief. The performances are never
less than competent and some are good, but that is not enough to make
up for the weakness of the writing and the lack of pace in the direction.
Peter Lathan
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