Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
ComedySoc in general plays it pretty safe with its shows. It has the original property of Got Booty, the derivative Shambles, and the blatant rip-off of Have I Got News For York. Occasionally there will be a sketch show or a “versus” panel-show event, but these are generally relatively predictable. All these are popular and humorous affairs, and certainly enough to provide variety to the nine-shows-a-term schedule. But then they come up with Hit The Fan, a new property billed as a “battle through a series of both scripted and spontaneous rounds”, which seems to be a mixture of sketch show and “whatever-Got-Booty-was-before-its-2010-redesign”.
The best way to describe the show would probably be as a partially-scripted improvised panel show. The rounds were all pre-written, yet managed to seem, for the most part, relatively spontaneous. Much of the improvisational aspects of the show were injected through audience suggestions of forfeits for contestants should they fail in the rounds. Sitting on the host Henri Ward's table were a selection of items, such as keyboards, finger buns, glittery trousers and Sellotape, and the audience was invited to suggest their ideas for forfeits to “Dr. Forfeit” (played by Tom Stokes, who seemed to take a sadistic sort of pleasure in administering the forfeits). This meant that by the end of the show, Tom Crowley was wearing glittery pants on his arms, Ellen Stevens was typing out everything she said on a keyboard, Freddy Elletson had his hand taped to his face and Justin Stathers had bread on his fingers (to which he remarked he'd been caught “bread handed”). Of course, the events were relatively scripted to ensure forfeits were administrated evenly between contestants, and for the most part this worked very well.
The rounds themselves were often of the surreal variety, beginning with a challenge to describe non-food pie fillings while Odinn Hilmarsson spoke about various food items to a “tense” guitar track. Perhaps not the best round to open on, this nevertheless proved rather entertaining, as the contestants yelled out random words in an effort to not speak about food. A particularly hilarious round was “The Picture Round” which, despite being completely scripted, was nonetheless hilarious in its ad nauseum humour device of pictures of pictures.
A particularly bizarre non-round occurred subsequent to this, in which the overture from 2001: A Space Odyssey started playing, during which the cast “floated” around the stage area, before dramatically falling over when the music was cut. This, while funny, was nonetheless quite bewildering. One particularly impressive technological feat of the evening was a supposed “live feed” to Lewis Gray for a “name that duck” round, in which the contestants interacted with a clearly pre-recorded video of Gray. The highlight of this round was arguably the end, during which the virtual Gray asked the real Gray (sitting in the audience) for a high-five. Despite ComedySoc seeming to struggle with tech in the past this year, this was pulled off very well.
This is not to say that all was perfect however. The show at the beginning seemed relatively disjointed, being as it was a new experiment for the society. Furthermore, some rounds such as the “building round” where contestants had to construct box-houses seemed to fall into a screaming orgy in which little could be discerned, while some, such as the “Snake Round” built up to a purposefully lame joke, yet execution was not particularly snappy.
Despite these hangups however, the show on the whole flowed very well, though I don't know if it would work so well were it to be repeated. Much of the appeal came from its surreality, but for a ComedySoc original I'd definitely say that Hit the Fan was a success.
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