Application for Life


PixieMoo Productions
theSpace@Jury's Inn

You can usually count on a fairly high level of esoteric bizarre nonsense appearing during the Fringe. Sometimes the novelty and intelligence in the scripting can give rise to a wonderful experience and at other times you end up with an occasionally interesting idea which never quite makes the transition across from page to stage in a comprehensible manner.

With Application For Life, there is certainly the germ of a whole swathe of interesting ideas, but most of them fail utterly to come through because the audience simply hasn't been let in on the joke.

The story is about Atelia and Klavia, a pair of Angels working in the department of Death in an office-based Heaven. There are a fair few references to biblical matters and an amusing running joke where any utterance of the word 'God' would bring down a spotlight and ominous music, but otherwise the story is quite pedestrian.

On Earth, capitalism is about to be swept away, so Atelia builds a great Ark to fill with the capitalists. Which might be funny, if we had an inkling as to why capitalism was important to Angels, or how precisely this bureaucratic Heaven worked or related to Earth. Instead we get an hour of a plot which is never really explained and for all the amusing hijinks and bickering of the two Angels, and the comedy news and weather reports which are periodically Heralded in. The whole escapade is somewhat baffling and unsatisfying.

Reviewer: Graeme Strachan

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