The word ‘bizarre’ cropped up twice in last night’s Footlight’s Spring Revue, IntercontiMENTAL, once in reference to the inclusion of tigers as a prohibited item at an airport security checklist, the other, an exclamation at the sights of Charlotte Church’s visage projected on a screen. In these contexts, ‘bizarre’ may have been used to neglect the duty of providing a proper denouement to the series of sketches which often threatened to leave the audience baffled. But this was actually why the sketches worked so well. It is difficult to relate the extent to which I enjoyed the performance without quoting the numerous outstanding lines.

There was something unpretentious and naive about the scenes, loosely tied together by the premise of covering the whole world. An ambitious aim, but realised in a simple way, with far-reaching locations: the Eskimo (Jazz Jagger) dreaming of Ayia Nappa; an embarrassed adolescent Loch Ness monster; and the role playing of Martians on an 18-30’s Earth-style holiday. The theme of travelling was a strong one: two pieces of luggage in baggage handling talk of Disneyland and ridicule an upstart American bum-bag (Sam Sword); the airline pilot who begs to perform the health and safety demonstration; the virtuoso enactment of deep vein thrombosis.
There were moments in which the ideas were bewildering, and certain sketches that the audience (I mean myself) didn’t understand at all; though this doesn’t mean they weren’t enjoyed. Yet the beauty of simplicity shone through in instances which saw a game of Russian ‘spin-the-bottle’ end in a stabbing, the rap of the grumpy pain au chocolat during a Continental Buffet ensemble or the peculiarly conjoined Siamese geisha twins (Moya Sarner and Frank Paul). There were moments in which the comedy erred on the derivative, such as the pilot reminiscent of the radiologist in Green Wing, or the Voodoo doctor who lent slightly too heavily on John Cleese. This should, however, be considered praise, and these moments stood out against the originality of the remainder of the comedy, which should be considered a great achievement. Tarzan’s tour of the Vatican, an astonishingly poor imitation Michael Flatley, the under-age wine tasting society (“I love this wine so much I could take it on a weekend to Brussels”) were realised innovatively. The performance may have involved an excessive animating of inanimate objects; such a scene was the dialogue between a married couple of specks of sand, and water droplets of the incoming tide. However, these situations lent themselves to the absurdism at which the Footlights seems to be so adept, with the occasional touch of post-modernism (“will you please stop being so comically misleading”).

Five Stars

Orlando Reade