Noble and Silver Pleasance
Daniel Kitson - Love, Innocence and the Word Cock Pleasance
Chris Addison - Port Out, Starboard Home Pleasance
Being Johnny Vegas Gilded Balloon
Fat Fat Pope Pleasance
The Marquez Brothers Pleasance
Far Too Happy Pleasance
Fucking Our Fathers Assembly
Rich Hall and Dave Fulton Present Terry Dullum Appeal Assembly
What's the best thing you've seen so far? That's the question people ask each other in bars all over Edinburgh at this time of the festival. It's how buzzes start. My answer, without hesitation, is: Noble and Silver (Pleasance). The duo's second show is so far beyond anything else advertising itself under the banner of comedy that the thought of them not winning the Perrier Award is laughable. That's not to say they will; just that, in a sane and just universe, they should.
Their show is damn near indescribable. I could compare it to last year's show (Technicolor next to monochrome) or analogise it with reference to music (The Beatles's White Album) or art (Picasso's first abstracts) or literature (Joyce's Ulysses). But while that puts it into context as a great leap forward, a radical and sublime achievement, it doesn't help you imagine what it's like.
Noble and Silver like to describe themselves as Bill Viola meets Benny Hill, which is sort of true, but perhaps the thing that most struck me watching the multi-layered loops of video, snatches of serious drama, kisses, dances and elliptical jokes enacted on stage by Stu Silver, Kim Noble, two actors, two dancers, two giant screens and various audience members, is that it is genuinely, utterly unpredictable. You literally never know, from one moment to the next, what is about to happen.
I came out of the show both disoriented and uplifted, my mind reeling and my skin fuzzy, as the man in the seat behind pronounced the spectacle 'shite' and half the audience looked simply baffled. Noble and Silver have their bad nights, technically, but the risk of failure is what makes this precisely ordered chaos such a vital live event. It is not really comedy at all, and yet I was crying with laughter. All I can say is, if traditional comedy bores you, go and see this. It's wonderful.
As for the best stand-up I've seen, that would be a toss-up between Daniel Kitson and Chris Addison (both Pleasance). The two are very different - Kitson's Love, Innocence and the Word Cock is entirely introverted and autobiographical; Addison's Port Out, Starboard Home a polemical tirade at the English abroad - but what they have in common is intelligence.
There was a time in the mid-Nineties when, cowed by a culture of laddishness, many stand-ups were afraid of displaying their intelligence for fear of seeming élitist or, frankly, a bit poofy. The names David Baddiel and Frank Skinner spring to mind. Cynicism and misogyny were in; vulnerability and anger very much out. Kitson and Addison - as part of a new wave including Dylan Moran, Tommy Tiernan, Johnny Vegas and Simon Munnery - are about to make those qualities hip again.
Daniel Kitson's show is particularly revelatory as it his Edinburgh debut. Half-hiding behind herbaceous beard and don't-hit-me specs, he does, as he says, look like a cross between a university lecturer and a paedophile, but he has an improbable and winning charm which permeates his tales of playground games ('bummer' is his favourite word) and the long slow loss of his innocence. He had his first kiss at 19 and now, four years later, he has, he tells us sadly, put his finger up a girl's bottom. It says something for Kitson's charm and skill as a comedian that he makes this seem like a minor tragedy rather than a dumb boast.
Chris Addison's new show is very much a continuation of last year's excellent Cakes and Ale, which examined Englishness with a scalpel and a blowtorch. Backed up by a giant map of the world and a soundtrack of Noël Coward songs, Addison lays with gusto into the myth of the English as great travellers, putting backpackers, imperialists, expats, hooli gans and the royal family up against the wall and verbally executing the lot of them. Anyone looking for a wittier, subtler, better-dressed and more charming version of Thatch-era Ben Elton has found their man.
All three of those acts have a good chance of winning this year's Perrier. Another top tip, before the festival began, would have been Johnny Vegas (Gilded Balloon), back with his first stand-up show since 1999. However, you need an actual written show to qualify for the Perrier, and unlike his previous two solo shows, Vegas seems happy to rely on his undoubted powers of improvisation to carry him through this year's Edinburgh. Unfortunately for him, on Tuesday night, sans potter's wheel, with eight members of the press watching, he died on his arse.
The evening began brilliantly, with Vegas exposing his vast white belly between the folds of a sand-coloured coat, pint of Guinness and fag in one hand, microphone in the other, blasting off one-liners at any audience member who dared squeak, like an old-fashioned comedy god. He seemed to be at the height of his powers, and then suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, he dried up.
Even a slurred rant through Wham!'s greatest hits didn't really rouse the audience, who were probably suffering heatstroke in the ridiculously humid Gilded Balloon main theatre, and Vegas was left to conclude, at the end of a fraught 90 minutes: 'I thought I was funny as fuck when I came in here tonight. You've taught me otherwise.' You have to admire the purity of his intention in doing a purely improvised show, but maybe next time he should write himself a solid 20 minutes as a safety net.
The best sketch show I've seen is undoubtedly Fat Fat Pope (Pleasance, reviewed last week), but second place would be disputed between the Marquez Brothers and Far Too Happy (both Pleasance). Both shows are snappily presented (video screens, good music), well written, well acted, and subtly funny.
The Marquez Brothers are two bulkily muscular blokes who examine their masculinity with surprising conclusions. At times, the theatre is awash with testosterone, as footballers, hooligans and men on the pull prepare for a night of heavy drinking. The ending flirts with melodrama, but the writing is generally taut and witty, and the intention undoubtedly good.
Far Too Happy is the latest offering by the renascent Cambridge Footlights, and is a low-key, funny, unpretentious look at life in an ordinary British street one evening - full of fighting couples, pathetic teenagers, and a Welsh, latently homosexual Grim Reaper. The best scene is a faintly familiar one: six people dancing in a 'Nineties retro' club, each separating themselves from the crowd and looking at the audience as the screen behind reveals their thoughts: disillusioned, anxious, or gormlessly ecstatic.
Finally, just in case the minor flurry of publicity surrounding Scott Capurro's 'play', Fucking Our Fathers (Assembly), should persuade you to go and see it, save yourself the wasted hour. I like Capurro as a stand-up but this 'gay love story' is the dullest, most embarrassing piece of drivel I have ever seen at the Fringe. Who ever thought naked simulated buggery could be so boring?
If you're looking for late-night entertainment, go and see Rich Hall (Assembly) instead. Last year's Perrier winner is back with a sketchily conceived but fabulously executed mock-charity show in aid of a seven-year-old boy with a lobster claw for a hand. Unfortunately you have to sit through 15 minutes of second-rate American misogynist Dave Fulton, but it's worth it simply for the joy of seeing Hall's impression of a WWF wrestler reading out the poetry of Jewel.
