Cats Like Cheese: 9 Lives
Note: This review is from 2005
Anton Pick's one-man show is not really comedy. It is more performance art pitched somewhere between John Hegley's poetry and Rowan Atkinson's reading of names in a school roll.
With his rich, would-be sexy voice with lots of beautifully-timed pauses, Pick has a show thtat is more performance than content.
But it got plentiful laughs from an appreciative audience partly boosted by giggling students from
Aberystwyth. Because 'Anton Pick' is really Antony Pickthall, former marketing and fundraising man theatre companies, now working at the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, a town he hates.
But he likes cats. And cheese. And performing. And feels guilty for having had his sick cat put to sleep by the vet. And that's the show, really.
Minimalist.
With artistic pauses.
"Salami might … be your … thing…. But(…. For me … it's cheese …. There's morphine… in cheese."
It's a quirky performance. Like cheese, not to everyone's taste and with occasional holes in it. But at least original. And, as the success of comedy is in timing, new comedians would be well advised to see this show where the material is not inherently funny and where there are no gags... but which gets genuine laughs.
Anton only really 30 minutes of materiaL.
He pads...
for another 30 minutes…
but his pauses...
are so good...
it's still entertaining and...
occasionally...
funny.
Review date: 1 Jan 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett