Show Rating:

Review

If this was Nick Mohammed's first Edinburgh hour I'd be happy

to cut him a bit more slack, but it's not. Last year he won awards

and this may have turned his head. Maybe a false sense of security

('I can do this, I've got an award that says so') made him concentrate

on gimmicks and not writing. In a set of character sketches across

the hour he gives us eight personalities, three of whom make

repeat appearances. Unfortunately at no point are you thinking

'I wish he'd do that one again'. And they don't develop. The

screechy voiced teenage girl (Asperger's? Kept in a cellar? Something's

clearly up) on a quest for the lavatory doesn't know her boundaries

and is invasive with the audience. 'She' doesn't have the charm

to pull it off and there's nothing intrinsically funny about

this socially awkward kid.

The gimmicky bit is personality analysis expert Bertrand Forer,

who - wait for it - has been dead for years. The trick here is

a pre-recorded set (sounding uncannily like old Woody Allen radio

recordings) which Nick mimes to convincingly, capturing the gesture

and body language of the posthumous self-appointed guru with

some skill, and seeding the set with some clever reverses in

which the present day slip and trip is cunningly foretold by

the dead professor's monologue. When questionnaires are collected

in from the select few in the audience, you know you haven't

seen the last of Forer.

He gives us prerecords for naked ventriloquism (ie, barehanded

no glove puppet) there's a reedy detective taken from the gentleman

amateur school who repeatedly fails to draw his own conclusions,

a rather good news report from a journalist who gets caught in

the irrelevant details and a mimed set with a typewriter that

comes alive and music escaping from a desk/biscuit tin/whatever

every time the lid is opened. I know I'm meant to enter the imaginary

world here, but it's been done before and better.

Nick works with broad brush strokes to create a pig-thick

Northern racist teacher and some working class Herbert of a fisherman

and gets a lot of fun from an orchestral conductor and a skilful

soundtrack. It's early in the run, so I'm sure some of the stridency

of the performance will calm down and the more subtle effect

should highlight the humorous intent.

Julia Chamberlain