The Albuquerque-based comedy duo’s
current show opened Soho Theatre’s new basement comedy space last
summer, and now returns for what is billed as their West End debut.
Well, this 275-seater venue, the former Players’ Theatre beneath
Charing Cross rail terminus, is no more and no less West End than the
Soho address, but if it helps bring wider recognition to Mark Chavez
and Shenoah Allen, then no one should quibble.
The pair’s trademark style is now well established: a stage bare save
for a couple of chairs, and performers bare save for a couple of pairs
of pyjamas; high-speed character/sketch comedy linked by a basic but
unconstricting narrative; great physical discipline spiced by riffs of
improvisation; and an almost endless inventiveness. The action begins
in a hospital, switches bewilderingly to outer space then coalesces
back into a tale about the discoverer of time travel travelling back in
time to prevent its discovery. (He, it transpires, is also the
literally bouncing baby boy who has just been born in the hospital.)
Their mime capabilities are glorious: a four-handed representation of a
horse’s mouth heralds similar renditions of the kind of
mouth-and-forehead alien make-up now conventional in screen SF… then
they raise the stakes still further by making the forehead a separate
character. Their improvised segments have them constantly on the verge
of corpsing each other, but not in the self-indulgent way evident in
less skilled companies; we can tell that this material will be fed back
into the show, and indeed there are significant differences from last
summer’s version. Furthermore, I don’t think I have ever seen a
performer set out to sabotage and send
himself
into giggles, as happened on press night when Allen got carried away in
a duologue with his own echo. The duo are accompanied by musician Kevin
Hume, who gets a solo number or two towards the end of the hour-plus
show when Chavez and Allen go into montage mode. As for the
give-it-to-me bird and its peculiarly orgasmic calls, let us agree
never to speak of it. It strikes me that I have not luxuriated so
richly in this kind of comedy since the mid-1990s heyday of The Right
Size (whose Sean Foley has directed the current West End comic delights
of
The Ladykillers); I can
imagine no higher praise than such a comparison.
Written for the Financial
Times.