Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars   A bowerbird, as Luke Rollason never quite gets round to telling us in his latest madcap potpourri of mime and existential angst, is from a fruit eating species of feathered friends renowned for their unique courtship behaviour. As the Wikipedia oracle does tell us, this ritual sees the male bowerbird build a structure and decorate it with sticks and brightly coloured objects in an attempt to attract a mate.   Welcoming his audience with a lampshade on his head while dressed akin to a Hare Krisnna jogger, whatever the significance of the show’s title, by the end of it Rollason has lots of mates. Utilising a ton of domestic detritus and kitchen drawer clutter, a singing sofa and coathanger shoulders for reals, Rollason’s set up resembles a friendlier take on Gethin Price’s self-destructive routine in the cabaret club segment of Trevor Griffiths’ play, Comedians.   This is punctuated by a pseudo lecture on comedy by Rollason cos-playing his physical slapstick fo...

Edinburgh Playhouse Three stars The great big number 25 emblazoned in white on a Milk Tray coloured backdrop scales the full height of the Playhouse stage at the opening of this greatest hits tour by any other name by the most singular of comedy double acts. The charity-shop lounge-core pre-show soundtrack too is as showbiz as it gets. Sired on a mix of punk and working men's club cabaret, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have always played with such iconography, even as they've subverted it with absurdist abandon. True to form, catchphrases of the “You Wouldn't let it lie” and “Look at the size of that sausage” variety are cheered to the rafters on the second night of a tour that almost never was after Bob Mortimer's triple heart bypass operation necessitated its first leg to be cancelled last autumn. Old friends such as The Man With The Stick, Donald and Davey Stott and Mulligan and O'Hare too are greeted like conquering heroes. All of which makes for what i...

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars It's telling that King's panto stalwart Allan Stewart's final solo number of his two-hour top light entertainment extravaganza is accompanied by a series of projected images of his colourful show-business back pages. It's even more so that the images give way to a pictorial roll-call of bygone comedy greats. As Stewart does an impression of each, it's as if he's taking stock, not just of his own successful career that has seen him make the move from club turn to TV star to panto legend, but of a bygone form that refuses to lie down and die. By drafting in his yuletide sparring partners, Andy Gray and Grant Stott, Stewart can play with their comedic chemistry further, while vintage-styled female sextet, The Tootsie Rollers, ventriloquist Paul Zerdin and Britain's Got Talent graduate Edward Reid make up a full and versatile supporting cast. There is also a big-voiced star turn from Kate Stewart, daughter of ...

Pleasance Upstairs 3 stars Wil Hodgson is now sponsored by Chippenham Athletic Football Club. For now, anyway. Because if the club’s camel-coated directors ever make the Edinburgh trek to see the pink-haired chubby-chasing punk-geek tattooed love-boy, he might end up getting a kicking. Hodgson’s latest outsider’s rant against his less than idyllic home town takes stock of how he got here, from West Country misfit to third division pro wrestler to the most dolefully deadpan of top light-entertainment machine-gun raconteurs. For an incisive and scabrous observer of a white-trash hamlet where a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show is a rite of passage bonding exercise with your dad, this is pretty much business as usual. Hodgson’s subsequent willingness to stand alone, possibly with Bull mastiff shit on his shoe, makes for a state of the nation address Channel 5 documentaries can only dream of. Where Hodgson goes now remains to be seen, although he really should think about reviving his wrestling ...

Underbelly 4 stars When is a show not a show? This is a question audiences may wish to pose to Edward Aczel, whose hour-long oddity pretty much does what it says on the badges he hands out at the end of a performance awash in some Beckettian, joke-free void. After introducing himself off stage (three times), Aczel uses a flip-chart and assorted graphs to monitor the success or otherwise of previous outings, before sharing brief gems of wisdom on topic listed on the back of his hand. Aczel’s delivery, if that’s not over-stating the case, resembles a lethargic Andy Kaufman re-wired as a post-modern Tommy Cooper, so deliberately shambolic is his gait. Audience interaction teeters on the edge of controlled disaster, and a quiz which flips the question and answer protocol on its head. As an experiment in how honest you can be on a stage without resorting to some desperate-to-impress second-hand shtick, it’s a refreshingly fool-hardy shot in the dark. As a piece of anti-performance live ...

John Cooper-Clarke – Underbelly – 4 stars Edward Aczel – Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better. – Underbelly – 4 stars Exactly when the veteran bard of Salford John Cooper-Clarke acquired national treasure status is hard to pin down, though it was probably somewhere between his TV ad for Sugar Puffs and his heroin addiction. Now clean but still rake-thin, wild-haired and bug-eyed behind shades that can’t disguise a terminally amused, totally wired mind, there’s an unexpected slickness to Clarke’s late-night Edinburgh run, and it’s clear that age hasn’t withered his razor-sharp wit. Bounding on to a near capacity crowd following a pre-show selection of 1960s chicken-in-a-basket cabaret classics, he drags a chair closer to the microphone stand and rests his bag on it. “Why struggle?” he ponders in his deadpan northern twang. It’s the double-edged sword of such seemingly throwaway one-liners that make Cooper-Clarke so deadly. Part club turn, part Dadaist o...