Show Rating:

Once you familiarised yourself with the landscape of this show, it is a true delight.

Created by a small troupe of actors from across the world, it features a dazzling array of multilingual characters bearing accordions, knives and small dogs.

It is, at first, like dreaming in a language you don’t speak: beautiful, amusing, but ultimately, baffling. After a while ,however, it starts to make sense that Hitler is being chased round the stage by a furious Eva, who is wielding a vacuum cleaner and spouting a stream of Germanic expletive.

You start to see the humour in Osama Bin Laden’s arrival on stage in a wheelbarrow advertising Johnnie Walker whisky. It still doesn’t make sense as such, but the nonsense has a pattern.

Some sketches are almost too beautiful to be funny – the ballerina who asks you to imagine how much better the scene would be if she had the right costume; or the couple with giant knives and forks who declare their love to music before devouring each other. Others are brilliantly, unashamedly odd, such as the accordion-player in the bloodied butcher’s apron looking for spleens.

The range of languages spoken adds to the show’s alien qualities. It is superbly acted and visually thrilling, like a Roald Dahl story directed by Dali and broadcast on a European TV station. Generally it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it has moments.

The two men playing women acted so seriously and looked so ludicrous, it was hilarious even before the sketch began; the grotesque, vicious supermodels, walking down the runway while engaged in a hysterical battle to be the thinnest and most glamorous; an incredibly imaginative and lewd sketch that imagines Prince Philip giving the queen a special birthday treat.

This Show Will Save The World is surrealist comedy at its very best.

Reviewed by: Nione Meakin