PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

the egg, Bath (Thurs 1 Sept)

We open on a squalid, studenty flat; washing draped on white goods, a kitchen table loaded with booze. It’s a party, sort of, except there are only two people – Josh and Ted – both staring into the middle distance as we shuffle in.

It’s a fascinatingly stilted, awkward opening, redolent of a thousand fizzled social exchanges after the small talk runs dry.

Eventually, Josh, the host, breaks the silence and launches into his signature elephant’s leg joke – a preposterous, long-winded shaggy dog story that lasts the entire play. Ted, meanwhile, his long-suffering, reclusive one-man audience, is left to meekly endure in silence until eventually, he snaps. When it comes, the breakdown – wonderfully rendered in taut, volatile fury by Alastair Willy – marks the culmination of Ted’s drawn-out ordeal during which he’s force-fed cocktails (he’s teetotal), teased, taunted and prevented from using the toilet by various combinations of the other party guests who drop in and out from time to time.

Just how far do we go in the name of being polite?

It’s a risky strategy framing an hour-long play around one interminably tedious 'joke', even a knowing one, and the pace sags somewhat in the mid-section as Josh rambles repetitively on ad nauseam. Here perhaps, some of the other guests’ subplots deserve a little more stagetime – too often they feel underwritten, especially as Ed Browning’s hedonistic, cavalier Scot and Eleanor Hocken/Kieran Lebutt’s fractured, tear-stained affair provoke plenty of laughter and intrigue away from the spotlight.

That said, with a universally strong cast of 11, the house party rings pleasingly true and the characters – the wild child, the drunk, the dysfunctional couple, the hornbag punching above his weight – all chime with anyone who’s slugged a bottle of Beaujolais over the kitchen sink or wondered what happened to their other shoe the night before the day after.

Overall then, this is a fine, thoughtful comic debut from young theatre troupe Legless Theatre, with a decent gag-rate and some snappy direction that keeps things bouncing along until the close. (Joe Spurgeon)

Copyright Joe Spurgeon 2011