Review by Steve Bennett

Well this definitely didn’t work.

While the surreal is usually delivered in an zestful, exaggerated way, Karl Schultz is doing it deadpan. But the too-gentle energy does him no favours in a show full of obstacles to stop the audience enjoying his offbeat humour.

His alter-ego is Matthew Kelly, and if he is related to the old Stars In Their Eyes host, it isn’t mentioned. He does, however have a towering bouffant hairstyle, cardboard beard, taped-on moustache and a massive scarf over flamboyant jacket.

He speaks quietly and slowly, sometimes with such aeons of time between lines that even Harold Pinter would be telling him to get a shuffle on. For a show that starts beyond midnight, part of the Pleasance’s scheme to accommodate some of the free shows left high and dry by the fiasco over the Cowgatehead venue, it demands a lot of an audience after a hard day’s Fringe-going. Tonight they certainly weren’t up to meeting those demands.

Add to the glacial pace the fact that lot of what he said is drowned out by his backing tracks, blaring out at needlessly ear-troubling volume, especially to an audience of barely a dozen (fewer by the end).

And finally there’s the issue that Schultz delights in pushing his ideas beyond the point of funny, further testing his audience’s patience. I suspect on a good night, some proportion of ticket-holders might share that masochistic pleasure, but not tonight – and Schultz was very aware of it, apologetically pointing out the poor reaction and so exacerbating it.

Yet some of the offbeat premises are funny, and they are certainly all original… but presenting them in such a challenging way is too tall an order. On a good night, he’d probably get another half-star, but I suspect the constituency of people who share this exact same sense of dry surrealism is too small to ever really be viable.

Hypnagogia, by the way, is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, so Google says. It’s an unfortunately apt title for a show whose presentation makes things so heavy-going that drowsiness may well set in.

Review date: 18 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard