Kettle of Fish: Tequila Mockingbird

Wednesday, 24 October 2007. Wickham Theatre, Bristol

Firstly - thank you to the company for inviting me and for sticking a comp aside for me. It's always much appreciated and I don't take it for granted.

This is the first show by 'Kettle of Fish' , a company of recent (2007) Bristol drama dept graduates. It was up at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer and is showing to the home crowd at the Wickham. It was an all-female company, which still seems to be a rare thing to see.

The show was loosely set up as a kind of game-show or 'reality' experiment show, with two 'presenters', five 'competitors/experimentees' and the odd 'expert'. As the audience enter the space, we're asked whether we consider ourselves a "success" or a "failure". The show starts with the two presenters introducing themselves as failures (aspiring to success) before listing the top five characteristics of successful people. Apparently, "successful people" are: Confident, Funny, Loving, Well-Connected and Ruthless. These characteristics are represented(?)/ embodied(?) by five performers who play out how inadequately they fulfill their label. Sometimes an "expert" is brought on to advise, sometimes not. Some of the 'competitors' get better at their characteristic, some don't.

In my experience, there are a number of traps that graduate shows tend to fall into, and this one fell into the "light comedy for Edinburgh" one. As you can probably tell, I'm far too jaded to expect anything at all from a graduate show, but I find this works as a good strategy for keeping me in check, so that I a)spit only the appropriate level of vitriol at the rubbish bits, and b)get pleasantly surprised at anything that shows a glimmer of potential quality.

Well this had a couple of glimmers going for it - there weren't any outstandingly bad performers (the material was so patchy though, that it was difficult to tell how good any of them actually were); and they were clearly unafraid of using humour in a 'ballsy woman' kind of way. I think it's the impact of Smack the Pony and Spaced.

My main criticism is about the lack of rigour in its writing and structure. It called itself an experiment, but then played fast and loose with that frame (findings presented before the experiment took place, complete lack of clarity as to what the objective of the experiment was). I know it's NOT A REAL EXPERIMENT, but if you want me in the audience to pretend that it could be, I need you on stage to act convincingly like it could be. But there was barely any reference to any of the conventions of an experiment, so the whole framework became a distraction and a bit irrelevant. It's possibly the secret science geek in me, but I hate it when artists do that. I feel like I'm being cheated by someone who doesn't think they have to try very hard to cheat me. Make more of an effort to cheat me, you artists!

I also found the writing quite lazy. Its points of reference seemed to be comedy sketches rather than anything with a more sustained dynamic. Everyone on stage was a cipher. Everything pointed to the gag.

Towards the end, they introduced the experiment... Eh? What? Didn't you introduce the experiment already? Isn't that what we've been watching for the last hour?... which involved blindfolding the experimentees/competitors and challenging them to find and eat 5 doughnuts hung loosely in front of them. What worked here was that the performers were going at the task with real conviction - it was simply more convincing than anything else that happened in the entire show. The 'presenters' were genuinely watching out for the blindfolded competitors, genuinely making sure that they didn't fall off the edge of the stage. It was a bit of genuine excitement in a show that was otherwise very very fake. Unfortunately the section ended with a musical routine (I think it was that song from A Chorus Line that you'll recognise even if you don't know the musical), which basically acted as the punch-line to the section and, to my mind, undermined it.

Most of the audience enjoyed it, and for a graduate piece, I don't think they did too badly at all for themselves. It was a show made for a cabaret space in Edinburgh, and some of the decisions which would have worked for that context, were a little out of place in a black box, proscenium arch studio theatre. I hope the next piece thinks a little harder and runs a little further with an idea.