Brian’s parents have decided to adopt him out…at the age of 24. In order to place him with another family, they advertise to sell the benefits to other couples of having A Son of Your Own .
The script of this show makes liberal use of surrealist lines and concepts, tipping their hat to the work of Monty Python. I’m a great fan of this type of humour, the weirder the better. In this case, however, they seemed to be only using strange for strangeness’ sake, making it very hit and miss. This approach works well for short sketches but doesn’t really extend to the longer play where it contributed little to character and plot development. The material that wasn’t surreal tended to be quite base, using plenty of innuendo which a colleague described as “the gigglings of a 14 year old boy”. There is a bit of social commentary going on in the script, but it kind of got lost in the absurdity of it all.
In an attempt to match the bizarre nature of the material they have populated the play with a range of insane characters that are portrayed in an extremely hammy over the top manner. There was plenty of overacting and frocking up by the all male cast to include a number of female characters. Rather than being entertained by the fun of a panto styled performance I found it annoying. Some of these characters were so far removed from reality that I wasn’t able to suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy them and found myself questioning most of their actions. I particularly had problems with the main character Brian who was played rather straight, merely there to interact with the strange characters around him but not really moving the story forward with his actions. It got to the point that I was so distracted by these issues that the conclusion to the story went by in such a blur so I was none the wiser. Not that I was particularly concerned as I didn’t care too much for these characters.
To give the cast some time to change costumes and set up the next scene, numerous video pieces were screened. They were well filmed using plenty of slick editing. I found a few of these to be quite funny (such as the TV advertisement for Brian and the news footage at a protest) they often went on a little too long, continuing well past a rather weak punchline. It was also used as a summarizing device at the start and end, using displayed text to tell what had happened off stage. The large amount of text used was such that it would disappear if you weren’t quick with your reading. With such a small screen I’m not sure how well it could be read by the audience at the rear of the theatre.
Even with the use of video to fill in the time between live scenes, the transition was very clunky. There was often a noticeable pause between the end of the video and the first sign of life on stage. In addition to this they still had to rearrange props, furniture and the small mobile screen that was used. I could forgive this on any other opening night but this show had previously played at the Comedy Festival so I assumed that they were supposed to be able to work as a well oiled machine. As for the mobile screen, I could see that this was used due to the size of the stage, but a permanent screen would have stopped the audience fidgeting between scenes.
I was disappointed with this show. It was a great concept that wasn’t realised to its full potential. My expectations of a polished show in its encore season were crushed.