‘Slutcracker’ really is just the least appropriate title for Tim Key’s extremely odd, extremely difficult to describe hour of poetry and other oddities, but after you’ve seen it you realize that doing the least appropriate thing at any one time is precisely what makes Key’s show so surprising and delightful. In fact, you’d be really hard-pressed to predict even a single thing that Key would be likely to say or do next. Just when you think you know where he’s going he does a complete 180 and wanders off onto a completely different topic.
I suppose you could say that the structure of the show is that of a poetry recital over pieces of gentle classical music. Key is constantly reaching into one of his many jacket pockets and pulling out very beautiful, ornate notebooks and flipping through them to find one of his short pieces of whimsical musings about subjects as diverse as dew, the generation gap, or the sizes of various animals. Occasionally he will simply wander off the stage and a one of a series of short, surreal video clips will provide a short intermission. But calling the showed ‘structured’ may be a bit of a misnomer. There’s a wildly chaotic air to the entire evening and while it could certainly be the case that the show is indeed tightly written (there are a lot of callbacks to earlier references, interlocking elements that support others later in the show), the illusion generated is that he is playing the entire thing by ear, randomly saying whatever pops into his head or shows up on whatever page of his book he flicks to.
If this review is not adequately describing the show I apologize, by its nature the comedy was diffuse, hard to pin down- at times I was laughing and I didn’t even know why. It’s not for everyone (some of the crowd seemed more bemused than amused) but I have found that I’ve been thinking about the show a lot since I saw it, turning certain elements over in my mind and laughing at them to myself all over again. But if you’re a fan of humour that is slightly surreal, slightly offbeat and always surprising, this show is warmly recommended.
Tim Key’s Slutcracker is playing until April 18th at the Melbourne Town Hall. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website