Nominated this week for the Malcolm Hardee award for comic originality, The Story Beast casts John Henry Falle – of sketch troupe the Beta Males – as a hairy, hammy, sweaty guardian of myths bygone and to come. He starts by reciting (make that roaring) his own, part-Anglo Saxon, part-gobbledegook, part-Ray Winstone version of Beowulf. He sings songs about romancing selkies and mermaids, which – not wholly surprisingly – soon devolve into bestiality.
He delivers the whole show standing astride a miniature town assembled from children’s toys and cardboard tat, a town wherein a murder will occur, leading in turn to a rebellion against its hairy, hammy, sweaty god.
The whole undertaking is riper than an autumn scrumping, as Falle scales himself up to fit the epic proportions of his tales. You may – as I did – find yourself recoiling from the in-yer-face performance, which makes the work of Brian Blessed (cited here as Falle’s doppelganger) look low-key. I also felt that the conceit could be more consistent. Some sequences, such as the song about the surfeit of directions to point in, seem arbitrary. Others – a skit about the discovery of bacon that stoops, again, to bestiality; a fairytale set in the 1990s – are tenuously related to the theme and not strong enough to excuse that.
But there are some very strong sequences, and Falle’s relish of folkloric and fantasy cliches (“on the high plains of Avalon,” and all that) is infectious. The songs and verses stand out, notably a wild take on the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, panicking at the implications of the original lyrics, and a rhyming pantheon of England’s kings and queens that sees the future as clearly as the past. The overarching narrative, which pits the Story Beast against his “arch-frenemy”, the Darkromancer, gathers to a satisfyingly ridiculous payoff, too. Beyond the bombast, there’s much to enjoy.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh until 31 August. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
