This week’s Camden Fringe reviews takes in The Bareback Kings at the Hope Theatre and Hølìdåÿ at the Hen & Chickens
“Why is Piers Morgan? Or what is Piers Morgan?”
Kicking off with a recreation of a Backstreet Boys dance routine is golden (although where was the windswept open shirt look…?!), so it’s clear that The Bareback Kings know what they are doing to get us instantly onboard. And their hour-long show incorporates so much that there’s no danger of ever wanting to get off. A mansplaining Q&A, slow jam lip syncs, audience interaction (with consent of course), pub therapy sessions and all manner of improv scenes going off at any and every tangent – it’s a riot.
Gary, Brent, Dirk and Tyson (aka Juliet Morrish, Francesca Reid, Rebecca Schuster and Lynsey Bonell) are great company. All very much takes on various shades of laddishness but all imbued with a cheekiness and warmth in their interactions both with each other and with the audience. They’re frequently hilarious, particularly in riffing off each other’s mis-steps and non sequiturs, and I could easily have sat through another hour of their banter.
From the outset of Hølìdåÿ, creator/performer David Hoskin acknowledges that a full hour of mime can be a lot and so the format he uses here is something of a mime+. Bringing in elements of physical comedy, even slapstick at times, broadens its scope, as does an involved sound design as we follow the travails of a fairly regular chap going on holiday to experience some fairly irregular things.
Elements of the show work extremely well – death by beach umbrella, asphyxiating fish and leaping dolphins all make the requisite comic impact. Elsewhere, the reliance on stereotypes and conversely the occasional move into something more abstract doesn’t always carry the audience with it (one sequence on the plane comes to mind, was it a dream? I’m not sure…). Hoskin is an energetic and engaged performer but I agree that an hour (and change) of mime proves to be a lot.
