In their show Poppycock, The Small Poppies presented a series of sketches that attempted to cut down certain people they felt needed to be taken down a notch. This show was filled with plenty of interesting ideas, but not much of it was transformed into humorous material. There were some moments of inspired silliness, but they were few and far between. Topics such as pretention, religious belief and global politics were woven into an overall narrative that linked neatly from one scene to the next and left no loose ends at the conclusion. Of some concern was that many of the sketches ended with a moment of the mundane or tragedy instead of a big laugh, resulting in near silence at the conclusion of each.
The cast were great at character portrayal and their talent as actors was clearly evident. Their impersonations of real people was hit and miss, often with rather shakey, stereotypical accents, but the one of John Safran was excellent. It was a shame that most of the humour came from laughing at the impersonation rather than the material.
Throughout the show were some video segments featuring the character of Technical Tom. With their deliberately dodgy voice dubbing, clunky voice over and daggily catchy theme tune, these videos were quite funny. After three videos that were variations on the same joke, I was concerned that we could only expect more of the same but they subverted the rule of threes to actually create something mildly humorous. They built upon this by presenting our pedantic hero in the flesh for a climatic showdown but it was creative rather than hilarious.
The linking of scenes left a lot to be desired as we were constantly left looking at a dark stage while the cast changed their often elaborate costumes. Overly long and unfunny introductions to the scenes often filled this time and the constant lowering and raising of the screen for the video segments became increasing annoying.
As a piece of serious intellectual theatre Poppycock would be good, but it didn’t really work as a comedy show.
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