Dave McNeill: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Pleasance Courtyard

An epic canoe ride? Yes!  A voyage of personal discovery? Yes? A skilled comedy actor? Yes again.

This is a piece of comedy theatre that sounds like a great idea.  Opening with a wonderfully pompous piece of Nymanesque music, he presents a serious thespian face to the world; uptight, dignified, disciplined.  It just has to end in tears.

Some of McNeill’s writing is subtle and funny , for example the voiceover for the very public rejection of his marriage proposal which gives him the impetus to take off for the voyage to China by canoe.  But this isn’t a straight narrative about a journey, it’s surreal, whimsical and as he says himself, complete bullshit. On the plus side,  he doesn’t rush anything, and doesn’t make the common mistake that manic equals funny. He’s an elegant performer, even when paddling a pretend canoe round a traffic cone slalom, but there’s something a bit off-kilter about him. There’s audience participation, and he gets the volunteers where he wants them, but there’s no connection to them, or really with the rest of the paying punters.  

It’s a show of many components and references, conspiracy theories, anarchism and crap dancing and complex sound cues – but for me it was alienatingly incoherent.  I just don’t understand why you’d spend the cost of an Edinburgh show on a project like this that seems wilfully inaccessible and bitty.  I had a surging feeling of ‘What’s it all for?’ that just wouldn’t be quelled. Doubly irritating as he’s plainly a skilled performer and competent writer, squandering his talent.

Performing a surreal epic is an ambitious call to make, and this piece has a solid structure and a plethora of ideas whirling about.   But then fridge magnet poetry  requires organisation to render it more than the sum of its parts.  

He’s written an adventure story but shredded it and mixed in other strands – it’s like trying to follow a narrative while someone is constantly retuning the station.   I guess you can never be wrong if you keep the audience off balance all the time, as they’re never going to be in step with you. But it’s a hollow triumph if you don’t actually entertain them.