Cracks In The Garden

Note: This review is from 2005

Review by Steve Bennett

This is true ‘spirit of the Fringe’ stuff: an ambitiously inventive piece, pushing new ideas into sketch-show comedy. Even if parts of the finished product don’t quite come off, the talented New Zealanders responsible earn full marks for ingenuity.

Jo Randerson and Gentiane Lupi are, initially, your typical double-act, teasing and joshing each other as they cheerfully introduce their work.

The sketches are quite dreadful bits of stagy physical theatre, devoid of the meaning they profess to be carrying. This is deliberate, but the line between intentionally bad and accidentally so is blurred, which means the viewer is still subjected to slow, overlong, laugh-free interludes, causing lulls in the show.

Other ventures are much more successful, such as their appalling stand-up routines: one offering the blandest of bland observational stand-up, bereft of any element of humour, and the other a politicised gender warrior who can’t get beyond the fact she’s a woman. Whichever actress is centre stage, her companion sits to one side, full of either nonchalant disinterest or raucously sycophantic laughter.

What makes this show is the wonderful dynamic between the pair. They are, it emerges, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, their on-stage relationship battered beyond repair.

As we progress each scene then descends into darkness or melancholy, the good-natured banter replaced by spite, violent anger or awkward wordless exchanges. The show lurches viciously in moods, disconcerting the audience at every turn. An uncertain lesbian tension ebbs and flows and the clashes between them often disturbing.

Randerson and Lupi are transfixing performers; their fractious characters compelling to watch through their dodgy sketches as much as through their huffs, tiffs and explosions of long-repressed anger at each other.

As the stakes are raised, the sketches become even more overblown – all giant, childish costumes and oversized props – only serving to throw the chasm between their cheerful ‘act’ and their miserable relationship. Finally, it all culminates in a surreal, awkward, dramatic climax, making little sense of what has gone before but leaving you in no doubt you’ve witnessed an impressive show of creative boldness.

Review date: 1 Jan 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

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