THE OXFORD REVUE vs THE CAMBRIDGE FOOTLIGHTS Playhouse Tuesday 21 October Only
Is comedy the new Peruvian sloth manufacture? No. Is it the new masturbation? Unlikely. The Oxford Revue steer a mostly judicious course between two poles of comic crapness: vacant surrealism and trite ribaldry. As a result they are very rarely crap.
As director and co-writer Leander Deeny points out, like the stench of an embarrasing parent slowly going off in the fridge, the spectre of Monty Python remains, for both Revue and Footlights, hard to dispel. And, yes, it’s in evidence here. But The Oxford Revue have some nice, if contrived lines (guy with cold feet to fiancee: “What if we’re too hairy, and we shave, and we get stubbly, and I grow it back, and you don’t, and we stick together like velcro?”). They have some nice ideas (tearful son phones up dad for advice while adrift in the Pacific Ocean). And they have at least one great comic actor (Daniel Harkin, terrific as a useless boxer).
Most importantly, they have masses of bacchanalian energy, which when all else fails (as very occasionally in this production, it does), carries them through with aplomb. As a result they are the one thing that really matters: laugh out loud funny. Who cares if the sherpa is a bit gammy in his left leg in cold spells at the end of the month if he gets you to the top of the mountain? Still, the Revue could do with finding some new things to take the piss out of. Embarassing parents, homophobia, hermaphroditism – all wholesome stuff, but easy. And they make it look difficult. Perhaps the best emblem of this production is its (brilliant) prank of writing to the BBC with a set of intentionally crap sketches. The laughter here (like all the best laughter) is somewhat nervous. Look! They’re taking the piss out of student self referentiality! Ha ha ha (wait a minute, what about…?) Because what’s really holding these people back is the feeling that somewhere, at some point, they’ve sat back and self-conciously racked their brains over the need to produce something called comedeeeeee.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003
This is not the Peruvian south
