Review by Steve Bennett

Ten Clowning Street are old-school clowns, with coloured foam noses, sprawling wigs and wide-eyed dumb grins as they pantomime out their big, silly routines dressed in bright lycra bodysuits, baggy Y-fronts, held up by braces for the twanging.

With their frisky physical high-jinks, it would be easy to think of this as a kids’ show, so they promise a serious, topical agenda: the question of Scottish independence. Should the proud people of Bananaland remain within the union of Great Plumdon, or go it alone. OK, so the analogy is not entirely serious. It’s also never quite clear if all this talk of bananas and plums is a double entendre, in which case breaking them up would evoke much different, hideous, imagery.

But these clowns certainly want independence. To say this was one-sided would be an insult to Mobius strips – but while there’s nothing wrong with promoting the ‘yes’ vote, their arguments would hardly challenge the intelligence even if their audience WERE the under-fives. The English are all all portrayed as old Etonian robber-barons, chomping on cigars and awash with ill-gotten money – they even have swag bags, lest the team be accused of subtlety – which they use to fund the biased BBC, sorry ‘PBC’, while the Scots are all jaunty fun-loving frivolity.

There’s some Knockabout entertainment with the cartoony nature of it all, with energetic old-school physical clowning and some daft character names like Basil Supple-Waddle. But there’s not a lot of depth to either the performance or the thinking behind it, so they tend to go around in circles, with ever decreasing results as similar scenes are played out again and again.

The non-physical sketches become irritating in their simplicity, the filmed inserts predictable; while the repeated improv game where a two-headed spokesman answers questions with each player alternating words turns out peculiarly flat - especially as most responses are just a couple of words, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

More juvenile even that it appears, ten minutes of Referendum Or Dumber would be plenty; after that I wanted to vote with my feet.

Review date: 23 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: The Stand's New Town Theatre