Review by Steve Bennett

Nick Hall puts a tremendous performance into Szgrabble, a one-man blur of a characters and mimes that parodies a Cold War spy drama and serves as an impressive showcase for his comic acting talents.

Yet for all these pyrotechnics, the script is staid and old-fashioned, full of all the archetypes and cliches that also belong in a bygone era.

The setting mimics the 1960s chess championships when Soviet pride rode on the superiority of their grandmasters over the imperial West (the same backdrop as Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical basically). But the parody is set around word games instead.

Arthur Fenchurch is a lowly stationery clerk in the British secret service, whose penchant for crosswords sees him pressed into action as Britain’s great Scrabble hope. He’s duly dispatched to Budapest and en route he must see off Russian henchmen, be seduced by a femme fatale and all the usual James Bond stuff. There is poisoned champagne, double-agents and a low-speed boat chase on the canal.

Hall recreates all this using just a couple of stools and huge reserves of energy, rattling through scenes. His effective mime work and stagecraft is further enhanced by Matthew Jones of Frisky & Mannish fame, providing an atmospheric soundtrack that adds to the cinematic scope of the endeavour, despite the minuscule budget.

The promotional blurb for Szgrabble invites comparisons with the Pajama Men, and there’s certainly the same fast-paced, character-switching style. Yet in the writing, he displays little of their imaginative flair, with too many of the jokes rely on tired tropes.

The spy drama parody itself is overdone, which needn’t be an issue with an injection of imagination, but Hall’s gags are a little too familiar. Time and again does he pull the old trick of undermining the artifice of mime, breaking what we imagine him to be doing to reveal something else, with ever-diminishing returns.

He knowingly mocks the corniness of the one-liner dropped after the hero dispatches an assailant  yet another familiar trope – but then he’s not above deploying a pun about pole dancers being people from Poland, so maybe shouldn’t be casting stones in this direction.

All this means that for all the spectacle and passion of performance, the show pales as its shortcomings become increasingly apparent. You long for a character that isn’t a thinly-realised archetype, more jokes you haven’t seen before, and a plot that isn’t so predictable.

Hall’s a vibrant, skilled actor but someone needs to find him a script to do justice.

Review date: 10 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: PBH Free Fringe @ Bar Bados