17 – 19 February
Imagine Mary Shelley with a bunch of chums in Villa Diodati feverishly writing a script based on a nightmare in which bits of mangled plays, weird conceits, improbable puns and tortuous non-sequiturs are to be fiendishly stitched together to relate a story of the devil coming down to earth to wreak havoc. The resulting play never sees the light of day, but is brought back to England in a trunk to lie, dead, forgotten, in a country house attic for two hundred years. Until, by chance, it is discovered by a crazed actor who, with swiveling, drug filled, pop-eyes, delivers a charge of electricity to revive this corpse of a play, which springs into gibbering life.
Moreover the play has a demonic quality, which affects all who perform it, filling them with an unearthly power, the power to talk nonsense, but somehow to make it intelligible and fill those who behold it with a strange delight.
Together with two equally manic (but jolly nice) confederates they set about placing the story, such as it is, in the amphetamine powered club scene of nineteen-nineties Manchester, where the devil himself is trying to muscle-in on the action.
Known collectively as Police Cops, Messrs. Hunt, Parkinson and Roe, fizz exuberantly as the tale unfolds. It all happens at breakneck speed with no ten seconds being the same as any other. Invention knows no limits: a sock becomes a vampire slayer’s sword, a ‘water cooler’ appears in two halves stitched to the lining of separate coats and god speaks out of his (or somebody else’s, I wasn’t quite sure) backside. The devil is ultimately thwarted in his attempt to get his hands on ‘Manchester sweeties’ and a son is reunited with his errant father, Father Badass, who is in fact a vampire slayer.
The impression we get is of something Mel Brooks might have considered for his producers, in which the most unlikely of stage plots turns out to be a rollicking hit. The atmosphere of the production is as if a bunch of students were putting on a play for their mates and having a jolly good time in the process, but lest we might think that is what we are getting there is a well observed little vignette in which some ‘drama students’ actually do put on a lackluster show-within-a-show.
In fact what you get for your hard earned money is some of the best and wittiest physical theatre available on today’s circuit. All in all, it’s an hour of hoot-out-loud fun of the sort your parents would definitely not approve.
★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 18th February 2022
Image credit: The Other Richard
