A gumshoe in a mac and fedora, lit by the glare of a solitary streetlamp. It’s a familiar image, although Humphrey Bogart never had the lamppost stitched into the lining of his coat. He didn’t speak as oddly as this, either. Butt Kapinski is the alter ego of US-based performer Deanna Fleysher, who was last on the fringe as director of Eric Davis’s aggressive clown-therapy show, Red Bastard.
Kapinski is big on audience participation, too, but of a gentler variety. It’s a refreshingly novel act, as Fleysher creates an interactive golden-age detective movie before our eyes, using just plucky punters, fluffed consonants and the iconography of the classic film noir.
The seating is arranged in a tight V: Kapinski walks among us, a gnome-like figure hunched under his lamplight, charged with solving a multiple “moider” that splays several punters across the venue’s floor. I can transliterate Kapinksi’s pronunciation of murder, but don’t ask me to write down his “whores”; l’s and r’s become w’s; every other word sounds ridiculous. It’s a cheap but effective way to add laughs to a show that leans heavily on the audience for comedy, as onlookers are cast as Chinese opium barons and Jewish landlords, violent husbands and sexy whowwe … wowhers … oh, forget it.
The cliches are deliberate; we’re invited to notice how we take these archetypes, particularly gender ones, for granted. There’s a skill, meanwhile, to coaxing audiences into this level of spirited involvement, and Fleysher has it in (Sam) spades. There’s no coercion; we don’t have to leave our seats; show-offy and shy are equally welcome. We never quite get the satisfying noir narrative that the show promises – and I’m not sure that Fleysher admitting as much in her meta-theatre epilogue is adequate compensation. But this remains a playful and atmospheric fringe curio, a light-touch role-play for anyone who likes their dicks private and their femmes fatales.
- At the Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
