I spent the first 10 minutes of Heath McIvor’s show Randy Writes a Novel marvelling at how expressive Randy can be. He’s just a purple puppet with ping pong-ball eyes, after all. But by the end, I yearned for the expressivity of a human being – because this is essentially a standup show spoken from a human perspective that doesn’t play to puppetry’s strengths at all.
None of which is to deny McIvor’s skills in the niche of standup puppetry. He remains invisible; we see only Randy at a desk, the manuscript of his new novel neatly stacked by his side. He’s here to read from it, but he’s too scared and keeps digressing – into a potted biography of Hemingway, a lecture on veganism and a hair-raising anecdote about buying a bookshelf on Gumtree.
McIvor tries to gird these disparate sections with a rather leaden moral about the meaning of art and our need to leave a legacy. But the show refuses to illustrate it. A mild comic charge arises in seeing a felt puppet express existential thoughts. But Randy’s identity is unclear here: sometimes he’s self-aware as a puppet; usually he’s ranting away from a human perspective, as if we’re not supposed to notice he’s made of cloth.
There’s ample compensation in Randy’s explosive delivery – all splenetic outbursts and cartoonish gasps of horror – and some good jokes about hoarding and Harper Lee. But, conceptually, the show doesn’t quite add up.
- At Underbelly Potterrow, Edinburgh, until 29 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
