Review: And the Horse You Rode in on

Barbican Pit, London Told By An Idiot is a company that, since 1993, has achieved a reputation for wild, innovative comedy. Now, in a show conceived by Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter, they tackle politics for the first time. But, while I applaud the intention, I have mixed feelings about the result. While they cite Dario Fo as one of their sources, the show’s creators give no sign of possessing the Italian maestro’s strong ideological convictions that allow him to wring laughter out of murder and terrorism. What we are presented with here is a number of intersecting narratives all concerned with political violence. A student decides to attack bourgeois complacency by setting fire to a dog. Another revolutionary conceals an explosive device under her jumper as if it were a baby. And, in a direct echo of Hitchcock’s Sabotage and Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a guilt-ridden anarchist gets a young boy to transport a bomb across London in a suitcase. If anything binds the stories together, it is that the ultimate destination for most of the characters is the fifth-floor cafe of Grace’s department store from Are You Being Served? Along the way, there are one or two inspired touches. One particular scene in which the pussy-fixated Mrs Slocombe and the camp Mr Humphries exchange their familiar English innuendoes in German has a surreal madness. I also liked the idea of a group of Italian circus acrobats who, when held hostage by Protestant terrorists, drive their captors to suicide by their unstoppably cheery singing. And the scenes borrowed from Sabotage gain extra piquancy by the fact that the characters are mouthing words which are being spoken by off-stage actors into microphones. The dialogue even acquires the double entendres of the department store sitcom: at one Mr Verloc nervously looks out of the window and sees “two policemen across the street, one of them licking an Orange Maid”. But I constantly found myself asking what point the show was trying to make. It proves that, on a technical level, you can persuade an audience to laugh at the intractable subject of bomb-throwing violence. But I sense none of the political passion you get in a work like Accidental Death of an Anarchist where Fo builds farce out of police brutality. Admittedly the 90-minute piece is performed with quick-change versatility by Nick Haverson, Bettrys Jones, Martin Hyder, Annie Fitzmaurice and Jane Guernier and inventively directed by Hunter himself. But the lack of any identifiable viewpoint means that the show, however vivaciously performed by Told By An Idiot, ends up signifying nothing. Rating: 3/5 Theatre Michael Billington guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 29, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.