Recent Articles
Showing posts with label sketch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sketch. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
- 0 Comments
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.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Sunday, January 6, 2013
- 0 Comments
I'm a huge fan of 'Horrible Histories'. The CBBC TV show is the single best sketch show that the BBC has put out in a long time. Shows that pander to both children and adults tend to miss the mark for both audiences, but 'Horrible Histories', with its twin ambitions of historical accuracy and comedy easily achieves both. The show springs from the equally entertaining series of books by Terry Deary which take the most bloody, demented and just plain odd events in history and presents them in a hilarious tongue-in-cheek manner.
At its worst, history feels staid and irrelevant; textbooks filled with stiffly posed portraits and endless lists of dates. I've always held that the fascination of history is examining how very real people who were much like us dealt with their environments and society. Presenting it as something inaccessible and preserved in aspic drains much of the excitement from it, rendering the lives of those that came before us as alien. 'Horrible Histories' aims to blow away the dust from history, by translating these distant events into farce.
 |
| Neal Foster and Alison Fitzjohn |
This stage version is a two-man show performed by Neal Foster and Alison Fitzjohn, who transform themselves into characters from the length and breadth of British history, from the historically famous to the surprisingly obscure. Neither of these two appear in the CBBC show, which may disappoint some members of the audience expecting a live version of that show. Even so, this production does bear many of the trappings of it's popular cousin.
The show takes the form of a series of sketches, presented chronologically as we progress through the history of 'Barmy Britain'. So, after a short introductory song, we launch into a Roman cooking show parody. This format will be familiar to anyone who knows the TV show. If you're learning about the Romans and the subject of food comes up, chances are a dormouse is about to meet a rather sticky end in the next few minutes. One thing you quickly notice is the seamlessness between both performers and their off-stage sound effects. As, say, a dormouse is gutted, there's a perfectly timed squishy sound effect. It all looks effortless as they toss stuff around to each other, changing costumes on the fly with a charmingly ramshackle costume kit. The overall effect is the illusion of anarchy on stage while maintaining an invisibly strict discipline.
 |
| Guy Fawkes on 'Who Wants to Blow Up Parliament' |
Thisshow, in keeping with its source material, doesn't shy away from the scatological. Within the first ten minutes or so someone has inadvertently brushed their teeth with a poo-covered stick, to screams of disgust from the children in the audience. I wholeheartedly approve of this interpretation of history: the past was an incredibly dirty place. If you're getting children to imagine the disgust and grossness that people lived with, then you're getting them to empathise with past generations, something that as far as I'm concerned history is all about.
This show is only about an hour long, so we touch on the 'Greatest hits' of British history one after another. Beginning with the Romans, we skip forward a millennia and have a quick sketch about the sack of Lindisfarne Monastery by the Vikings, before jumping another 500 years ahead and onto the wives of Henry VIII.
 |
| Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. |
One aspect of pop history that always gives me pause is the romanticising of some genuinely horrible events. My (least) favourite example is the cottage industry surrounding Jack the Ripper, the violent deaths of some poverty-stricken sex workers being exploited to sell a load of tat in the East End. So, in this sketch when we're presented with a cheeky, cheery Anne Boleyn asking the audience whether she should tell Henry VIII that she doesn't want to marry him because he's fat and his breath smells I feel more sorry for her than amused. Maybe I'm being a bit too soft here, after all, the life of Anne Boleyn is impossibly remote from my own but even so, I was dreading a series of jokes about her death. A death which may have happened nearly 500 years ago, but is still the death of a terrified woman who'd suffered a series of miscarriages, and was consequently dragged to the execution block and murdered.
I shouldn't have been so worried, as what this production excels in is abrupt changes in tone. So when Henry VIII is suddenly chasing Anne Boleyn around the stage with a sword things quickly become a quiet and serious as her head is removed from her body. From this point on, the sketches do begin to take on a surprisingly grim tone. Don't get me wrong, this is still a show where the audience is encouraged to clap, sing and dance along to silly songs but there is a certain morbidity running through it.
 |
| A sketch about hygiene in hospitals during the Crimean War. |
During a sequence about children being hanged for petty crimes in the Victorian era the tone is generally lighthearted, but by now they're not afraid of scaring the audience a bit with a vivid description of what an execution at the Tyburn gallows entailed. I suppose if you are to keep a roomful of children enthralled then scary stories are as appealing as grossing them out. Even so, I was surprised at where they went for their next sketch.
Amelia Dyer was a baby farmer, a term which has little relevance today, but was quite rightly one of the most despicable crimes a person could be accused of in the Victorian era. Dyers modus operandi was to hunt down expectant mothers who feared they'd be unable to care for their baby once it was born. Presenting herself as a respectable married woman, she'd offer to take the child in and feed, clothe and raise it, in exchange for a small fee from the parents. In actual fact the newborn would invariably find him or herself taped up in a paper bag and thrown into the Thames to die. It's estimated she killed up to 400 newborn babies in this manner. Pitch black stuff, and not exactly where you'd expect a lighthearted historical sketch show aimed at young children to go.
Dyer herself is depicted as a mad, old drunken Pythonesque crone, someone who wouldn't in a million years ever be considered a suitable guardian of a newborn. While this does slightly unfairly shift some of the blame onto the bereaved parents, it's still very funny. Even as she's tossing dolls off stage and cackling through a gin-soaked haze the audience still giggles away happily, demonstrating a their appetite for the macabre.
 |
| Field-Marshal Haig being taken to task by 'Alan Sugar' |
We soon get to the the Great War, and a parody of 'The Apprentice'. Field-Marshal Haig is being interviewed by Alan Sugar about his failure as a 'team leader'. Sugar points out that he had the resources, he had the tools and berates him for throwing a man's life away for a centimetre of two of progress. It's here that the show takes a surprisingly swift political turn; no punches are pulled when it comes to condemning the nightmare and human cost of the Somme. One line that stood out for me was when Haig was condemned with the line, "They may put a statue of you on the Mall, but as far as I'm concerned you're a failure. You're fired!". It's an irreverent, Blackadderish anti-establishment swerve, and one that I think takes some of the parents by surprise. We're asked to cheer or boo as to whether we think Field-Marshal Haig was a hero or not: nearly all the children boo (and so do I), but some adults cheer, they're lonely voices. It must be slightly disheartening when a show as gregarious and friendly as this turns against you, especially if your children are happily booing along with everyone else.
After this comes a finale, where it's explained to us in song that although the past may appear incredibly weird, cruel and disgusting, if people were transported from there to the modern day they would find the way we live equally weird, cruel and disgusting. It's a nice, light-hearted bit of historical relativism, and provides an opportunity for the production to get some digs in at what might be considered bizarre today. It's telling what they choose, the first is the use of NHS Direct rather than visiting doctors for a diagnoses, the second is remote drone attacks in Pakistan! Of all the places I expected 'Horrible Histories' to go, it wasn't here. It manages to make a decent political point of the cruelty of inflicting death from halfway around the world where you can't hear the screams.
I should stress that although this all sounds very serious, the show is consistently light-hearted, fun and entertaining. It's pretty short, but manages to pack a lot of history into an hour. Both the cast members play off each other fantastically, and even though the anarchy on stage is necessarily an illusion, it's a convincing illusion. Furthermore, it's not just a collection of context-less trivia, nearly all the sketches have a point to make about of how history can be relevant to us in the present. That, as far as I'm concerned, makes this show a success.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
- 0 Comments
I was a bit surprised to find an Edinburgh comedy preview on at King’s Place. The place is ultra classy, all pine, neat sculptures and £4 bottles of beer. They have Dyson Airblades in the toilets which, while they have become slightly more ubiquitous, are still my benchmark for an upmarket establishment. I’ve only been there before for classical music and I always feel a bit out of place there. I'm just waiting for a security guard’s hand to gently but firmly land on my shoulder and ask me to “please leave now sir, quietly, and without a fuss”. I don’t know how these acts managed to wangle their way into here, but it’s nice to see comedy in such a deadly serious venue.
Max and Ivan are… Con Artists
I don’t want to beat around the bush, this was wonderful stuff. 'Max and Ivan' are Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez, and they play every role in a complex Oceans 11 style heist thriller. It satirises nearly every trope of the genre, and manages to pull off giant action set pieces with just two chairs and two guys. The tone of the humour reminded me of Hot Fuzz or the golden age of the Simpsons in that while it pokes fun at the ridiculous aspects what it is satirising, it still, on some level, takes its own narrative vaguely seriously.
Watching what is essentially an ensemble piece with 7 main characters performed by two people does require that you pay attention. It’s a bit like being thrown into the deep end of a pool to begin with, but each character has a distinct body language and accent, so you learn fairly fast who’s who. 20 minutes into it you can easily tell who’s ‘on camera’ just by body language, let alone accent. I haven’t seen any of their other productions, so I don’t know if this kind of complex, multi-character narrative is anything out of the ordinary, but it’s a credit that even as the plot twists into unlikely contortions, we can still follow what is going on. Each of the main characters is quickly and efficiently sketched out. The characterisation is by necessity, fairly broad (the sinister Russian oligarch, the jaded, upper-class female hacker, etc) but even through all the jokes, and even though the fourth wall was comprehensively demolished I surprised myself by actually caring what was going to happen to them. Now, I wouldn’t exactly go so far as to say I was emotionally invested in these characters, but most of them have little mini-arcs within the narrative that pay off pretty satisfyingly and you find yourself caring when they are placed in danger.
This was the premiere performance, and things were a little rough around the edges. The second half was largely performed with scripts, but the charisma of the performers carried them through. They hit just the right balance between chatting to the audience and getting on with the performance. It was almost scary how quickly they built up a rapport with everyone there, and the audience was consistently enjoying themselves even through the occasional forgotten line or missed cue. In fact, the scrappy nature of the performance probably added to the enjoyment, and some of the biggest laughs were as a result of adlibbing.
The structure of the humour seems influenced in some way by the ‘cut away gag’ nature of animated shows like Family Guy. We repeatedly ‘cut away’ to say, films that the characters appeared in, or a previous heist. Unlike Family Guy though where the cutaways don’t forward the plot, and just serve to reference some random piece of 80s pop culture, all of these filled in a nice bit of backstory and added to the characterisation. There are some inspired bits of writing in this, which I don’t want to spoil. My favourite however, was the “that’s not a con!” sequence, which just kept piling on the ludicrousness to great heights.
I would love to see this again towards the end of their Edinburgh run to compare the difference in performance. I’m curious to see whether the off-the-cuff nature of the adlibs and the close camaraderie with the audience survive a month long run.I’d like to think it will. I also want to see how Ivan looks after doing the toothpaste gag for a month (he's right, that can't be healthy). But I loved the rough edges of last night, and even with missed lighting cues, scripts on stage and forgotten lines wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The Three Englishmen: SQUARES
The Three Englishmen are Ben Cottam, Nick Hall, Tom Hensby and Jack Hartnell. It’s much harder to write about their set than it is Max and Ivan, mainly because of slightly subjective factors that stopped this being quite as funny as it should be. The format is relatively quick-fire sketches covering pretty disparate ground. It ranges from straightforward parody to the surreal.
Technically there is not much wrong with the show. The costuming is quick, simple and effective and the characters within the sketches are, like Max and Ivan, quickly and efficiently defined. We can usually tell what stock character is being used from the first line said. The jokes are original and fairly creative – there were very few times where I thought that something missed the mark completely, and yet somehow the show felt lacking. It was loose and ponderous where it should have been razor-wire taut.
The annoying thing is that there are lots and lots of excellent jokes in this show, but the energy frequently dips, or the show lingers on a particular sketch past the punchline. The most funniest sketches were the shortest, the two involving boys/buoys were straightforward and funny without outstaying their welcome. Some just didn't work, for example, the Juliet Binoche joke just went on and on and on with no clear punchline in sight other than copious mugging to the audience.
It’s even worse when the concept of the sketch is pretty good, and would work if it was half as long (the Wine Shop sketch particularly) but it gets bogged down in repeating what the audience knows over and over again. If the joke is (and sorry for spoiling this one) that the guys running the wine shop are hopeless alcoholics, it doesn’t get any funnier after the second or third time you’ve shown us this. 3 or 4 minutes later the same joke was still being made and was rapidly getting unfunnier.
Towards the middle, the show began to fall into what I call the Whirlpool of Sympathy. This is when something happens that makes you feel sorry for the performers on stage. This happened during a song towards the middle where we were exhulted to sing along - “come on, you know the words!”. Apparently not. No-one sang along. In that instant there is an immediate disconnection between performer and audience. The audience feels a sense of group self-consciousness and you can’t help but think “why is no-one singing along?”. A frisson of discontent spreads through the crowd, suddenly there is a dividing line between the act and us. We are now not on the same page. I don’t know what the performer must think in that moment, confronted by a sea of silent, uncomfortable faces, but I’m betting it’s not good. I find myself feeling a bit sorry for the people on stage– it’s got to be a horrible feeling when people apparently aren’t having a good enough time to sing along with you. It’s hard to laugh at someone when you’re feeling a bit sorry for them. At this point we are both are trapped in the Whirlpool of Sympathy, it’s not a funny place, and it's damn hard to get out.
It feels a bit callous to be so critical, really. It’s clear to everyone watching that everyone on stage is funny in their own right, and that this is material that’s been worked on quite a bit. There are outstanding moments, for example a sketch where animal behaviour is acted out to the narration of David Attenborough – a concept that’s probably good enough to sustain an entire show on its own. The low points are the one-joke sketches that go on too long where the one-joke isn’t even particularly funny, like the Chris de Burgh sketch.
Towards the end there is a colossally unfunny celebrity chef song that lands like a lead balloon on the stage. It just keeps going and going. And I suppose it’s funny in a way that the audience can’t even recognise the chefs in question without being told who they are (if you think about it a bit harder you realise that probably means this bit isn’t working very well). We’re asked to sing along again. Silence. I feel more sympathy for the performers, who are trying so very, very hard to entertain us.
Sympathy should not be the emotion that comedians engender in their audience. I’m convinced there’s a great, lean, punchy 45 minute show here. They’ve just got to trim the fat out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)