New Art Club: This Is Now - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Even in this diverse festival, New Art Club must be unique: a comedy double act who work in the field of interpretive dance.

Wow, you’re still reading. Many would-be punters will surely be put off by the potential for pretentiousness here – and the duo’s name probably doesn’t help – but this accomplished pair aren’t quite what you expect.

For starters, there’s the idea behind this show: the first Now That’s What I Call Music compilation album, released on LP and double cassette – cassette! – in 1983.

As expected, we get finely-choreographed dance routines based around some of the tracks contained therein, from Heaven 17’s Temptation to Men Without Hats’ Safety Dance. It’s a nostalgia trip all right, but these segments are mere interludes in the thrust of the show, rather than being their core.

There are some wry asides about the music of the day – their sarcastic take on Malcolm McLaren’s Double Dutch being particularly on the money – but this isn’t an episode of I Love 1983, so trite observations about fads and fashions are thankfully kept to a minimum.

Instead there comes some intellectually impressive stand-up here. The show begins with an offbeat routine about the changing emphasis in the albums’ titles over the years, very physically performed, which leads into a quasi-philosophical discussion about the temporal conceit of ‘now’. It’s the sort of comedy you might expect to find from Stewart Lee, so coming from two hoofers is especially surprising.

While the nature of nostalgia is similarly explored, with unexpected conclusions, the main narrative revolves around schoolboy sexual awakenings. Tom Roden and Pete Shenton were teenagers when the record came out, so the tracks stir up memories both fond and not-so fond for them both.

So that’s whimsical romance and the high-falutin clever stuff covered; how about offensive comedy? Well tick that box with the routine that recreates an IRA reprisal killing, as if performed by Hot Gossip to a disco soundtrack. So wrong, yet so funny,

The show comes unstuck when Roden and Shenton invite memories of childhood friends from the audience, a segment that slows down the show and produces little reward other than a way into one dance sequence. And some of the stand-up is just a little too slow – giving a chance, perhaps for the duo to get their breath back after some of the more demanding exertions – without paying out on punchlines.

But this is the sort of imaginative fusion of art forms that the fringe was made for. There, I’ve made it sound pretentious again, even if a warm, thoughtful and entertaining hour is what you actually get from joining the New Art Club.