Square Eye Pair: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Gilded Balloon Teviot

Richard and Max are a pair of telly-obsessed friends who spend their days debating the merits of Betty Rubble vs Wilma Flintstone and imagining their greatest moments accompanied by voiceovers and canned laughter.

Their endearingly geeky bromance begins at school when they unite against the school bully (a cartoon of evil who appears posed, Kick-Ass style, from behind the sofa) and develops through university and early adulthood, bolstered by Buffy box sets and annual celebrations of their ‘manniversary’.

But then Richard gets a girlfriend complete with Flintstones jumper and a deep appreciation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the boys’ relationship is rocked: ‘I thought he was one of those guys who didn’t need to be attached,’ says a bereft Max, ‘like TinTin or Golum.’

Kiwis Eli Matthewson and Hamish Parkinson make a good fist of their characters; they have the fanboy nerd nailed. Brynley Stent is also decent as both the school bully and Richard’s sympathetic but unimpressed love interest, though her accent when she plays a Jeremy Kyle-esque chat show host appears to have been picked up at the Dick Van Dyke School of English.

Storytelling techniques riff nicely on the show’s slacker feel, with arguments thrashed out via video consoles and remote controls used to pause one character so the other can let the audience in on a few secrets. Many scenes are conducted with the pair slumped on the sofa facing out, reacting to TV shows on a screen imagined just beyond the audience – a surprisingly engaging trick.

It’s a nicely told tale but it's unambitious. The storyline is staple bromance fare, the characters are slacker genre cliches and freeze-framed fight scenes feel too familiar from films like Scott Pilgrim and Kick-Ass.

This won’t provide many surprises or thrills but it’s a perfectly enjoyable way to spend an hour.