Uneasy laughter

Spectator, The, Aug 25, 2001 by Rubnikowicz, Renata

Fringe

Technology took over the Fringe this year, as everybody who was anybody brought video into the act. Prime movers were Ross and Noble (Pleasance), whose show began in the middle and seemed to end at the start. They called on members of the audience to help, but that was the only traditional element in a cut-up collage of scenes, some dealing with relationships, some just wacky - a clip of a fly being squashed or an on-stage attempt to inflate a lifeboat. People laughed, but I suspect they were the ones with degrees in media studies. The rest of us were fascinated, unsettled, bemused. This is the bleeding edge of comedy. I was reminded of the first time I saw Monty Python - if you didn't get it you were past it.

The Marquez Brothers (Pleasance) also dished up short, edgy scenes, but with a clear narrative. Their sensitive, lachrymose footballer, keener on cooking than boozing, and his bewildered boss, used to more macho lads, are very funny, not least because they so accurately reflect the bewilderment of so many modern men.

No such uncertainty afflicts Priorite a Gauche, who call themselves `France's hippest rock and pop sensation' (Pleasance). Didier and Jean-Francois arrive in a cloud of dry ice, rapping in the accents of Antoine de Canes and in the style of Ali G. With their absurd Franglais, they are as unthreatening as a pair of exchange students. C'est pas cool, mais c'est chouette.

There are no Mr Nice Guys in The Terry Dullum Appeal (Assembly), in which Rich Hall takes an outing from his Otis Lee Crenshaw character (last year's Perrier award-winner) to appear as Tex Witherspoon, a scat singer with Tourette's syndrome, in a fake benefit for a similarly afflicted boy. I would have taken it as a brilliant comment on the inability of most Fringe comics to utter a sentence without swearing if Hall had not chosen Dave Fulton, a Seattle performer whose act is about as original as Bernard Manning's, to open the show.

After the success of Puppetry of the Penis, which became the first Fringe show last year to win a West End transfer, female comics seem to be drawing conclusions about what it takes to get noticed. In The Weird Sisters Get Around (Pleasance), Alison Goldie, a former presenter of the Chelsea Flower Show on BBC 2, and Kath Burlinson, who has a PhD in Victorian women's poetry, bill themselves as `two attention-seeking tarts with no talent'. That's not true. Their sketches and characters are inventive and witty, especially Shine, the American holistic nutrionistcontortionist, and Aisha, a stand-up in a burka that leaves only her eyes showing. And their Vagina Duologues are hilarious. But they aim to push the limits. Three women walked out fairly early in the show, and they wouldn't have liked a later sketch in which, as if to challenge the aforementioned puppeteers, one of the Sisters manipulated her uncovered 34Bs, provoking only the laughter of extreme unease.

Another woman who wants to shock is Ursula Martinez (Assembly). Her show starts with a conjuring striptease. As the red silk handkerchiefs vanish so do her clothes, until she is completely naked and there is only one place to find the last handkerchief. After this attention-grabbing beginning, she dresses again and engages the audience in discussion about her life and her show, sometimes breaking off to record her video diary, or to eat an onion, or to ask the audience to show they love her by coming on stage and kissing her. By taking solipsism to extremes she's often very funny and, as she proved in her 1998 Fringe show, A Family Outing, in which she came out to her mother and father on stage, since she's a nice girl from a nice family, the effect is oddly non-confrontational.

The Fringe is not all nudity, cursing and techno, however. In They Shoot Arrows Don't They? (Pleasance), Charles Collingwood and Judy Bennett - Brian and Shula in The Archers - gently reminisce about their careers in the radio soap and reveal some studio secrets. It's professional and entertaining, as far from the in-yer-face format as it's possible to get.

This has been a good year for Fringe drama, ancient and modern. Liz Lochhead's poetic and compelling version of Medea retold in a Scottish voice returned to the Assembly, with Maureen Beattie magnificent in the title role, while in Old College Quad, Teatr Modjeska from Poland tore through a short, visceral Coriolanus. This was strictly old-tech. Flaming torches, a rattling chariot and fights so violent that the staves broke and the promenade audience scattered in real fear made for a passionate and memorable hour-anda-quarter of Shakespeare.

Movement of a more contemporary kind comes from Theatre de L'Ange Fou in Entangled Lives (Pleasance), a beautifully conceived and executed piece in which four men and three women embody relationship twists with intelligent action and some humour. The extent to which their show springs from the human emotions is underscored by comparison with the and antics of Pyromania, whose Embryonic Dreams (Pleasance), while expertly done with stunning lighting effects and a pounding electronic score, was so unengaging as to be plain boring.