Binns presents a variety show featuring three acts - all, of course, played by Tom Binns. There's Ian D Montfort, a psychic with less than uncanny mystic powers; 'Tom Binns', the ventriloquist who hasn't quite mastered keeping his mouth from moving; and Ivan Brackenbury, the hospital DJ with the most inappropriate taste in music. And the thread running throughout is the art of making it look all wrong, even when you can do it right. Binns kept reminding me of Les Dawson playing the piano or Tommy Cooper messing up a trick.
Montfort plays with, toys with, his audience to poke fun at the con tricks and gullibility essential to 'real' psychic acts, by never quite getting it right. Then slips in a genuine trick at the end. It's easy to see why this character has his own full one hour show elsewhere on the Fringe.
Binns' ventriloquist brings out a family of characters - his parents, wife, children and a couple of oddities - all of whom have some curious speech defect that prevents them from speaking properly - especially words beginning with B.... But there's a lot more to this act than poor pronunciation and the backstories of the characters are funny in themselves.
The most quickfire laughs come from Brackenbury who talks about a patient's illness then unintentionally plays the record most likely to upset them. Hilarious, but ultimately a more limited character than the others and Binns sensibly keeps it shortest.
This show is extremely funny throughout, requires an audience that pays attention as there are several half-hidden gags lurking in the undergrowth, and is definitely one for lovers of irony. Oh, and there's a really good political joke sitting in there too. Binns is a huge talent and should be much better known than he is.
Highly recommended.
Tom Binns : The Club Sessions is on in the Bosco Theatre, George Square at 12.40 until the 31st.
Showing posts with label Ventriloqist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ventriloqist. Show all posts
Tuesday, 25 August 2015
Wednesday, 5 August 2015
Nina Conti, Pleasance One, Edinburgh Fringe
A good start to our Fringe, practicing our skills at queuing whilst slightly damp.
A good start too in the choice of show. If you've seen Nina Conti on the telly you'll know the kind of thing she does. Not your everyday ventriloquist. Her new show, In Your Face, is heavily improvised and relies a great deal on audience interaction. The only puppet is the snide and sarcastic Monkey, who gets away with insulting audience members while Conti plays the innocent. But most of her act involves getting people up on stage, putting on them a grotesque mouth which she controls, and providing their voices.
There were a couple of weak points to the show. The section where Nina is put into a trance by Monkey, who then carries out his own conversation with audience members, dragged a bit. On another night, with a different set of responses, it might work better, but the lack of laughs was noticeable. And she was trying out a new ending in which she dons a nude body suit, facing back to front, and places one of the clumpy mouths on the back of her own head. An intriguing idea, and the bit where she attempted to sit down, bending the wrong way of course, was slapstick funny, but it felt like an idea which needed further work. No doubt it will have turned into something slicker by the end of the run.
Those two moments only stood out because the rest of the show was so good. It's certainly not cerebral comedy, but it is remarkable. The quality of her ventriloquism skills was to be expected. What impressed most was the ability to improvise dialogue for her subjects. She could work their mouths, but not their bodies, and yet much of the time the body language was in sync with what was being said. How much of that is down to the person feeling a need to adapt their own movements to the words they appear to utter, and how much is Conti's ability to tailor the words to the body language she is seeing, was always hard to tell. It must be a mentally demanding exercise, especially when there were four people joining her on stage, all given their own distinct voices.
The results were consistently hilarious, and it's easy to imagine going several times and seeing an almost totally different show each night. Great fun.
Conti's show is in Pleasance One at 21.00 and runs until the 30th.
A good start too in the choice of show. If you've seen Nina Conti on the telly you'll know the kind of thing she does. Not your everyday ventriloquist. Her new show, In Your Face, is heavily improvised and relies a great deal on audience interaction. The only puppet is the snide and sarcastic Monkey, who gets away with insulting audience members while Conti plays the innocent. But most of her act involves getting people up on stage, putting on them a grotesque mouth which she controls, and providing their voices.
There were a couple of weak points to the show. The section where Nina is put into a trance by Monkey, who then carries out his own conversation with audience members, dragged a bit. On another night, with a different set of responses, it might work better, but the lack of laughs was noticeable. And she was trying out a new ending in which she dons a nude body suit, facing back to front, and places one of the clumpy mouths on the back of her own head. An intriguing idea, and the bit where she attempted to sit down, bending the wrong way of course, was slapstick funny, but it felt like an idea which needed further work. No doubt it will have turned into something slicker by the end of the run.
Those two moments only stood out because the rest of the show was so good. It's certainly not cerebral comedy, but it is remarkable. The quality of her ventriloquism skills was to be expected. What impressed most was the ability to improvise dialogue for her subjects. She could work their mouths, but not their bodies, and yet much of the time the body language was in sync with what was being said. How much of that is down to the person feeling a need to adapt their own movements to the words they appear to utter, and how much is Conti's ability to tailor the words to the body language she is seeing, was always hard to tell. It must be a mentally demanding exercise, especially when there were four people joining her on stage, all given their own distinct voices.
The results were consistently hilarious, and it's easy to imagine going several times and seeing an almost totally different show each night. Great fun.
Conti's show is in Pleasance One at 21.00 and runs until the 30th.
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