Harrogate Theatre, Friday, 7th October, 2016.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This show from Kill The Beast is off-the-charts wacky, crammed with energy exhausting to watch, craziness worthy of certification and big laughs enough to warrant the label ‘success’. It is also bonkers enough to require both investment and significant acclimatisation.
I try to avoid too much prior knowledge of a show, so my expectations were only those created by the flyer and a few review headlines. Although billed as a wacky, alternative comedy piece starring a cast with ‘trademark dreadful faces’ and a mash-up of 80s/90s influences, the space-age, over the top opening musical number and subsequent over the top dialogue snippet are a shock to the system. What follows though is some great physical comedy, witty one liners and hilarious non-sensically combined ideas dotted perfectly throughout the hyperbolically odd yet very funny script. It’s not my usual taste or brand of humour, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself once I’d given in to the silliness and the uncontainable energy – and I’m so glad that I did.
I don’t think this show would have worked at all without the total conviction of the actors – and I marvel at their ability to perform such a script, in such a way, with such skill. There were no cast lists available and I haven’t been able to find one on the site but I thought ‘council worker guy’ and ‘growling granny’, as I shall call them, were particularly great in their very well sustained and at times, genuinely creepy delivery; never far from a laugh at any one time. ‘Super fan girl’ and ‘superhero voice guy’ were also very strong performers but had fewer of the big laughs assigned to them.
The surreal choreography accompanying the ditties about the damp rising and a subsequent need to vacate the building had me in stitches; salsa hips with dead pan faces are a marvellous comic combination. Large sections of the script itself are very clever in master-minding some excellent lexical concoctions; factor in the physical comedy and vocal delivery of the cast, and it makes for some brilliant moments (the ruby necklace, the mops, the gap year pics and performances of ‘The Damp is Rising’ and the ‘council workers’ songs all being particularly memorable).
Much of the comedy with this story lies with “the hand” and the ‘creature’, both of which are utterly ridiculous yet hilarious; after half an hour watching this show, I was drunk on the infectious silliness and energy of Kill the Beast. Their style and this show are not for the faint hearted among us. However, if approached with that ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that Coleridge was pontificating about, coupled with unconditional investment, it has the potential to be a real hoot.
Always Time For Theatre 