Your average Mark Thomas gig is crammed with characters. No story goes by without reference to the pranksters, activists and frontline workers – still less, the police officers and security guards – in whose company he has stood up to the forces of power. Yet, in his 33 years as a standup-cum-theatremaker, Thomas has always done it alone. Even when he got volunteers to play the Wakefield locals in The Red Shed, an inspirational tribute to small-town resistance, it was fundamentally a one-man show.
Not so in Showtime from the Frontline. Although he uses the narrative arc of one man’s adventure into the unknown – in this case, the Freedom theatre in the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp – this one is a three-hander. Rather than simply tell the story of running comedy workshops in the occupied West Bank with tutor Sam Beale, he illustrates the experience by sharing the stage with two of his students.
With their clownish sense of physical comedy, Faisal Abualheja and Alaa Shehada take on the roles of nervous fellow standups, inquisitive soldiers and sceptical theatre directors. They also chart their own developing routines: Shehada finding a voice of scatological mischief, Abualheja discovering the funny side of the nightly curfew.
It seems appropriate that director Joe Douglas (soon to take over Newcastle’s Live theatre) has previously staged John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, because as with that polemical landmark, the politics of Showtime from the Frontline are built into the form as well as the content. It is a comedy show about a comedy show, one that demonstrates the radical power of giving a voice to the voiceless.
Like a firebrand Derren Brown, Thomas tells us the tricks of his trade without spoiling the fun when he puts them into practice. The show can be demanding: it’s one thing absorbing the daily details of checkpoints, pipe bombs and hunger strikes, another to laugh them off with gallows humour. But in its gesture of common humanity and its call to laugh in the face of totalitarianism, it flies a defiant flag.
- At the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 17 February. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then touring until 21 April.
