Review by Steve Bennett

Review

I once got hit by a truck while I was standing on the pavement. My head hit the edge of a low brick wall on the way down. I got concussion and had no real idea of what was going on for about six
months. This show had much the same effect.

I suspect it was a bad show but I can't tell. There were three Germans and two Chinese in the audience who, I suspect, spoke little or no English. I began to think I might myself have turned into a Mongolian herdsman with little grasp of Western European life.

The show was performed by a young blonde-next-door, a man with cropped hair and a beard, plus a middle-aged couple They might well have been a demented family of stranded aliens living inside human skins in a cave under the Royal Mile who decided to go out and confuse the locals for a week.

There was a sexually suggestive sketch involving fresh fruit interrupted by the middle-aged man wearing a leather flying helmet and holding an erect black truncheon. 'I'm from the Flying Squad,' he said. What this had to do with sexually suggestive fruit or anything, I have no idea.

There was a man being interrogated by a policeman for being found in a brothel with no trousers who eventually utters the climactic punchline: 'I'll confess, but not to the likes of you.' The woman with dyed black hair did a poem about bondage and S&M; then she played a mother introducing her daughter to her new boyfriend, who was dead; two Irish priests talked about religious belief with the punchline 'Frock off, Murphy,' then there was a crazy plant lady and I think I may have dreamt the rest.

It was like a glimpse of life in a parallel universe where the locals act logically to a script that made sense to them but made no sense at all to me. As we left, the Germans were trying to explain the show to each other. I wish they had explained it to me.

The one good thing about the Holyrood Tavern is that they never put on ordinary shows. To call this one incomprehensible would be to considerably understate the case.

John Fleming

Review date: 1 Jan 2006
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett