PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Comedy Box at the Tobacco Factory, Bristol (Sat 9 Sept)

COMEDY One of the few overtly political comics still at large in the UK, Mark Thomas has carved out a niche for himself as an activist-cum-journalist-cum-funnyman. His new show, about his walk along the Israel-Palestine ‘security barrier’ (the Palestinians call it a wall), is an ambitious and entertaining piece of story-telling, as well as a deeply serious meditation on the meaning of the wall for people on both sides of it. If the auditorium packed with earnest Guardianistas and stalls full of political pamphlets is faintly reminiscent of an 80s ‘alternative’ comedy gig, one suspects that this abrasive but nuanced show is both subtler and funnier than much of the stuff that came out of that era.

It’s more one-man play than traditional stand-up show, with a typically colourful and well-drawn cast of characters played with muscular, sweaty vigour by Thomas himself. The punchlines are there, but more impressive is Thomas’ evident affection for almost everybody he comes across in his journey, including people whose politics he can’t stand. Rather than pillorying the ultra-Zionist estate agent he meets, who envisions settlements all the way from the Mediterranean to the East bank of the Euphrates in Iraq, Thomas is bold enough to admit how charmed he was by the man’s ebullience and complete, unqualified conviction in his project. When he meets the British Consulate General in Israel (the wonderfully monikered Richard Makepeace), he’s stunned to discover that this supposed friend of Israel once hosted a banned Palestinian book fair in his back garden, and feels an unfamiliar twinge of patriotism; as he observes, “that is an event truly worthy of bunting.”

It’s clear where Thomas’ political convictions lie, of course, and in between the more surreal stories of, for example, a run-down Palestinian zoo featuring a stuffed giraffe, there are some truly shocking descriptions of the effect of the wall on normal Palestinians. But if Thomas is preaching to the choir, he at least has the courage to call it out when it hits a bum note: lefties who dress up as clowns and mimes (a regrettable development at some recent protests) are identified as the teargas-fodder that they are; when Thomas sees some of the more banal slogans graffitied on the Palestinian side of the wall - “When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free” - he sneers that “it’s as if the PLO have been taken over by Hallmark.”

There are some awkward shifts in tone between blokey, jocular banter and the more earnest and poetic sections, and Thomas relies a little too heavily on too few comic techniques - callbacks, self-deprecation - to find the laughs. But it’s a hugely impressive couple of hours that never becomes anything like a simple polemic. The well-judged encore re-frames the problem of the wall from the Israeli side, leaving the audience feverishly discussing this most complex of conflicts as they file out and the pamphleteers descend. (Tom Hackett)

Copyright Tom Hackett 2011