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Showing posts with label hen and chickens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hen and chickens. Show all posts
Friday, August 23, 2019
Friday, August 23, 2019
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Rating: 
Space Age Love Songs sticks closely to a familiar template. It's 1984 and our heroine is Cami (Reanne Black), a teenage girl who doesn't fit in. School is full of preppy snobs, while she mopes through the corridors in a ragged Siouxsie and the Banshees top. Her cruel booze-soused mum badgers her to 'look normal' and 'fit in'. Her suit of armour is a pair of headphones and a Walkman - if life is going to suck it may as well have a great soundtrack.
It'd be easy to extrapolate a John Hughesian plot from that setup. Cami would struggle against societal pressure, meet a guy, have her one best friend give her a makeover, promptly realise true beauty is within, go to the prom and dazzle the bullies who once mocked her. Cue The Psychedelic Furs.
But Space Age Love Songs subverts most of this. Writer TL Wiswell takes what would ordinarily be a background element of these stories and brings it to the forefront. Here, the one person that recognises Cami's worth is Daniel (Robert Twaddle), who occupies the 'gay best friend' role in the narrative. He's a wonderful and rare creature, standing out in his dowdy environment like a peacock in a henhouse.
Were this most other stories, he'd be an ancillary character. But here he's essentially the secret protagonist. Wiswell's script goes in heavy in exploring what it would really mean to be a camp gay man in a 1980s high school: the omnipresent threat of physical violence, dealing with a father who desperately wants to fool himself that his son is straight, feeling the pressure to 'act straight' to fit in and the ever-present yearning to be free of this hell.
Cami is infatuated with him, though her affections quickly receive hostility and disgust from Daniel's boyfriend Matt (Andie Worth). He's essentially a gay supremacist, daydreaming of a world inhabited solely by gay men, where straight and women (who he refers to as 'fish' and 'tuna') simply don't exist. Hypocritically, he cares much more about fitting in by putting up a facade of straightness, to the point of having sadistic romantic encounters with women because "one mouth is as good as the next".
What follows is a loose romantic rivalry between Cami and Andie for Daniel's affections, all leading towards the end of year Prom. It all adds up to an uplifting paean to the way marginalised people can support each other - and specifically to the relationships between gay men and straight women.
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| Robert Twaddle as Daniel |
Overlaid on top of all that is an allegorical science fiction story about enslaved 'Mandroids' yearning to be free of the mines they're forced to work in that squash their talents. In this fantasy, Daniel is the leader of the Mandroids, becoming a revolutionary leader that squashes their human masters and lives forever in beauty and poetry.
That all takes place in Cami's imagination (I think) and these sequences are probably the best in the play. The cast are uniformly great dancers, with the fantasy scenes giving them the freedom to really go for it. Cue dramatic lighting, new wave music and elbows violently thrown at sharp angles. It's great (especially so in the sequence set to Heaven 17's Geisha Boys and Temple Girls), and more than justifies the Flock of Seagulls referencing title.
Thing is, these fantasy sequences really only have a tangential connection to the rest of the play, leaving this feeling like two narratives battling against one another. Both are compelling, but having to compete diminishes them both. Perhaps if the allegorical elements were a little stronger it'd work better, but as it is the connection between them is tangible... but a little loose.
Fortunately, that doesn't stop Space Age Love Songs from being consistently and thoroughly entertaining. Reanne Black's performance anchors things emotionally, mainly via her impressively communicative eyes. They're able to convey awkwardness, annoyance, anger and sadness with merely a glance. She brings a nervous energy to the part that works gangbusters, her performance distilling a tonne of references down into one extremely likeable heroine.
But anyone who's seen this can't deny that Robert Twaddle is the centrepiece of the show. He's simply magnetic:, androgynous in all the right ways and possessing enviable precision and confidence on stage. This is all showcased in his fantastic 'ostrich' performance, in which he embodies the large flightless bird to a David Attenborough remix. It's and he are amazing.
I had a great time at Space Age Love Songs. It's ragged around the edges and the narrative vinyl skips more than a couple of times, but this is clearly a sincere labour of love from the entire cast and crew. Micha Mirto's direction pinpoints the exact right tone, the cast are committed and enjoying themselves on stage and the carefully curated soundtrack is great (it's also helpfully listed in the programme). Check it out!
Space Age Love Song is at the Hen and Chickens Theatre until 25 August (tickets here), then moving to the Two Brewers from 4-28 September (tickets here).
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
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What better way to spend a drizzly and miserable Monday evening than with Cock and Fanny? Ho ho ho, but seriously folks - I'm not talking about fucking. I'm talking about An Evening with Cock and Fanny (FYI if you're at work I don't recommend Google image searching that title), a sketch comedy show nestled in the performance space above the Hen and Chickens pub. Cock is Matthew Howell and Fanny is Lauren Taylor, and they're setting out to prove that sketch comedy isn't dead.
Granted, though it might not actually be dead, it is definitely very nearly dead. Back in the 90s and 2000s you couldn't move without tripping over some star-studded sketch behemoth: be it The Fast Show, Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show or many, many more. You'd think that the era of YouTube and self-publishing would have brought about a renaissance, but apparently not. Now Howell and Taylor have banded together to "have one last crack at the sketch comedy whip".
Let's get the most important thing out of the way early on - Howell and Taylor are funny. Seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many performers fail to clear this very simple bar. Very, very broadly they fit your archetypal Two Ronnies style class differences - Howell tending to play Hugh Grantishly clueless poshboys and Taylor playing straightforward working class women. It's a comedy combo as old as the hills - cos it works.
Helping things is their obvious chemistry - they started as 'bickering' housemates and have a rock-solid feel for each other's rhythms and comic timing. Being able to sense that their comedy partnership is organic rather than artificial works wonders, we feel as if we're in on the joke.
However, when it comes to the actual material things are a bit rough around the edges. The obvious highlight is a genius sketch in which a man who's been in a relationship for ten years confesses that he doesn't know his partner's name. Firstly, I'm terrible with names, so I can sympathise with the poor guy. Secondly, there's a surreal beauty to the situation compounded by how well the pair have thought through how this could work. Also, it's got a killer punchline. Gently twisted reality like this reminds me of my personal sketch faves: Chris Morris' Blue Jam.
There's a couple of other decent ideas for sketches, though a couple aim for targets too big and obvious. For example one about contemporary picky eaters (vegans, gluten-intolerance, allergies and so on) is performed fairly well, though this it navigates overly well trodden comedic ground. Other sketches suffer from going on a couple of seconds too long - once the punchline has been delivered we're just spinning wheels until the next scene.
On top of that there's the straightforward observation that there just isn't much to the show. Despite some admirable attempts to pad things out with fourth wall busting connective tissue, there's only maybe 5 or 6 sketches and the curtain falls a mere 35 minutes after it rises. As a critic it's quite refreshing to be home before 9pm, but I doubt I'd be quite so generous if I'd forked out for a ticket.
Despite this, Howell and Taylor genuinely do have something. They're both personable and charismatic, share a promising imagination and, once more for emphasis, they're both actually funny. But this isn't quite the show it could be: while it succeeds at being basically entertaining it's crying out for a bit more content and some judicious editing. I'm not too worried - this pair have clearly got the goods, they just to deploy them a bit more effectively.
★★
An Evening with Cock and Fanny is at the Hen and Chickens until 4 August. Tickets here.
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