FESTIVAL lO— LATE
shorn punnery and all-too-obvious targets met with a, ahem, seal of disapproval.
Talking chives and Jilly Goolden analysing Hooch were among the limited highlights while misogynist builders, Daily Mail hacks and psychotic pilots feel all too familiar. There is talent among the trio, for sure, but, sorry guys, the writing just isn't there. (Brian Donaldson)
I Club Sea/s (Fringe) The Pleasance (Venue 33) 556 6550, until 30 Aug (not 28) 77.30pm, £5/f6 (f4/f5).
COMEDY PREVIEW Jimeoin
For a man who has shared a telly stage with Des O'Connor, Jimeoin has miraculously succeeded in keeping his feet on the deck. The finest Irish comic currently based in Australia had no qualms about appearing with a man some people see as a child of Lucifer. 'Apart from the fact a lot of people were watching it, it was just another gig,’ he insists. ’They make yOu look good!
Which would be a fair description of his career with five nights at the Queen’s Hall — 'more nonsense’ — followed by his film debut in The Crack, a tale of two men being pursued by Australian immigration and terroristic paramilitaries. It is written by somebody called Jimeoin. ‘It doesn’t single out any particular paramilitary group,’ insists the amiable one. ‘For a lot of them, the situation is nothing to do with getting a united Ireland or retaining ties With Britain — it’s power and thuggery.’ (Brian Donaldson)
I jimeoin (Fringe) Queen’s Hall (Venue 72) 668 2079, 27—25 Aug, 70pm. £9 (£7).
Glynn Nicholas: wide-eyed and legless
COMEDY REVIEW Glynn Nicholas — Crossing
The Line * it it
This is gtiite a strange show. Not because it does anything very radical, but because its first half is so different from its second.
For 40 minutes, the audience is treated to a textbook display of surrealist/observational stand-up. And it's very funny. Nicholas’s outlook on the world is one of wide-eyed naivety - he is bemused by what he sees, and very gifted in making us see the 'normal’ as bizarre.
But things go distinctly pear-shaped in the last twenty minutes. There’s a long, ranting monologue, a guitar appears and the audience is cajoled into participating in a bloody sing- song. Why? iEd Grenby)
I Glynn Nicholas — Cross/ng The Line (Fringe) Glynn Nicholas, Assembly Rooms (Venue 3) 226 2428, until 30
Aug (not28) 70 75pm, f7.50/£8.50 COMEDY REVIEW
“550/5 7 >50) Bea Love At Midnight COMEDY REVIEW *
Club Seals When love goes wrong nothing goes * * right. But when cabaret becomes just a
series of glam, sequinned outfits and a sprinkling of lightweight humour, things get seriously rough.
Bea Love celebrates love cabaret-style. With her pianist/accompanist playing a hapless young Cupid, Love talks love and the horrors of misfired darts. When Love tires of love, she muses on the
The tiny sauna-like oven in The Pleasance known as The Attic is hardly the most ideal place for an audience- member to embark upon a discreet exit. The first walkout OCCurred after twenty minutes of the Club Seals' clever if lukewarm material as their
Club Seals: shorn punnery 80 THE LIST 15—21 Aug I997
'4
COMEDY REVIEW John Hegley ****
John Hegley: pommes and poems
Join Luton's premier performance poet on an autobiographical odyssey through space and time. In this new show. employing chalk. cheese and potatoes - or pommes de terre, as the newly bilingual John Hegley prefers to term them - the versatile versifier offers a potted history of his own life, plotting the relevant conurbations on a makeshift map as he goes on his
merry way.
Punctuating his journey with poems and reminiscences, he charts out the checkered course of his life, revealing the traumas of pre-teen sexual jealousy and Catholic schooling and referring, maybe a mite too often for comfort. to the beatings he would take from his father. Perhaps it is in Oedipal rebellion that Hegley wears a sharp suit - Hegley pere, it seems,
was a man of sartorial inelegance.
The Lutonian seems less concerned than ever to conceal the pain that feeds his comedy - but, fear ye not. there's no shortage of levity in the cladding that encases this dark core. The absurdist wordplay and bathetic humour are ably matched by his manic physicality and steely audience rapport. And then of course, Heggers plays pop. If comedy is the new rock ’n' roll, then Hegley's mandolin is its Fender Telecaster. (Andrew Burnet)
I John Hegley (Fringe) Traverse Theatre (Venue 75) 228 7404, until 24 Aug (not 78) until 77Aug, 70pm; 79—24 Aug, 77pm, £9 (£6).
Prozac generation, the Blair era and updates a Noel Coward number.
It's a lavish Technicolor affair - pink flamingos crowd the stage and Love's outfits don't stint on glitz —- but there is more to life than love.
(Susanna Beaumont)
I Bea Love At Midnight (Fringei The Garage Theatre (Venue 8 7) 228 22 75, until 29 Aug (not 74, 76, 79, 27, 23, 26, 28) midnight £4.50 ([3 50)
THEATRE REVIEW Seizer ****
Gate-crashing other people's emotional debris is a popular sport these days With the media obliging with a parade of blood and tears. Exploring this sating of gutter-instincts, BOIIerhouse combine Oprah-style confe55ional With coliseum blood-baying. Charismatic and sadistic Seizer puts three danCIng bears through their paces, tWisting the knife by dredging up old wounds, all the while goading the audience to join in the game.
With flaming torches, camera close- ups and pumping soundtrack, the promenade production is not always successful in combining public spectacle with intimate emotion, but emanates raw energy through a titillating and disarming truth onslaught. Think again before jumping on the couch with Kilroy. (Claire Prentice)
I Seizer (Fringe) Boilerhouse, Scottish International (Venue 7 92) 220 5606, until25 Aug (not 75, 76, 23) 70pm, [8 (f 6)
COMEDY REVIEW
Kevin Gildea
* *
Kevin Gildea’s got some pretty good jokes, but not nearly enough of them. After a slow start — which looked less
like ’saving the best to last’ than ’getting the rubbish stuff out of the
' way first' -- he was always struggling to
get on top of the show.
Quality material, especially surrealist stuff like the consequences of overdosmg on morning-after pills, is delivered With considerable charm by this likeably cheeky Irishman. But much of this show is just mediocre — predictable punchlines, obVious observations and scraping the barrel punnery.
Gildea would be great in a twenty- minute show, but 60 is pushing it. (Ed Grenby)
I Kevin Gildea (Fringe) Pleasance (Venue 33) 556 6550, until 30 Aug, 70.30pm, f8/[850 ((7/0. 50)
STAR RATINGS t it t t t Unmissable t r it * Very ood * t 1' Wort seeing * it Below average it You've been warned