Like many fans of The Mighty Boosh, I , by association, am a fan of Rich Fulcher. I am particularly a fan of, I think his most wonderful characterisation, Eleanor. Rich brings her to life in this full length show for her fans.
Being a Saturday night, the audience in attendance were also fans. There’s no way to say this without sounding like a massive comedy snob, so I’m just going to say it and be damned (I will also preface this by saying that it is a generalisation). Weekends during festival are usually big nights for mainstream audiences, and when you’re seeing someone off the telly on a Saturday, you can usually be sure that your surrounding co-audience members are the same people who booked early, are unlikely to see anyone who hasn’t been on the telly, and are not prepared to be discerning enough to judge the show by its merits. They are going to whoop and laugh, no matter what, they’ll eat up a catchphrase, and their TV hero person can do no wrong. On this occasion, at least two fans in the audience even brought gifts which they managed to present to Rich mid show. I hate festival Saturdays.
So, the loud, vociferous audience brought Eleanor into the room, with wolf whistles and wooos. And despite the over enthusiasm around me making it difficult to hear anything at first it eventually settled down and I started to get into some of this seriously X rated material. I’m not exaggerating, this is properly rude stuff. I might mention at this point that sat next to me was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old. This show is restricted and under eighteens aren’t allowed in without an adult. But that’s okay; he was there with a woman, who I assume was his mum. But I couldn’t help giggling to myself, when some of the more expressly rude bits came up, about what this boy and his mum were going to talk about in the car on the way home.
Mum, what’s jizz?
It’s the same thing as spunk darling, now stop asking questions.
As I say, properly rude, which, people who know me know, is right up my alley (so to speak, ha, ha!). Speaking of double entendre, there was a glut of that, and plenty of pun fun also. That’s not to mention a plethora of Boosh-isms. For the uninitiated, by that I mean absurd, often very wordy, non sequiturs. Eleanor mixes up anecdotes with a couple of musical numbers, interviews ‘live via satellite’ audience questions (kept to a minimum, two gifts was awkward enough), voice overs and slides. There is some very funny material here and it is extremely well put together. It’s easy to detect the hand here of Dave Brown, the director, also of The Mighty Boosh fame (he’s the man inside Bollo).
All that said, I was left with a feeling of disappointment. Much of the first half of the show was dominated by the sense that Rich was lacking in any energy or enthusiasm for the task at hand. This is something that might be able to be clumsily disguised in stand up or theatre. But the only way to sell solo character performance is through one hundred percent commitment to the role. It should be said that he perked up occasionally, but seemed to drop out again easily and I really got the feeling that he would rather that he wasn’t there.
Whilst much of his performance is almost in caricature, during the latter part of the performance Rich proved himself to be extremely proficient at appearing to be drunk.
The exuberant audience contrasting against a performer who seemingly didn’t want to be there left me with a hollow feeling. I was looking forward to this show and am sorry that I didn’t go on a night when our performer was in a better state of mind. Unless he’s like that for every performance, which would be a bit rubbish considering the $30 price tag. Let’s hope I caught him on a bad night.
For full details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website