As the audience is seated we have a chance to peruse Rachel Walker’s sumptuously decrepit set and observe the harlequin entity of the sole musician who I’ll rave about at the end, as he fiddles about in accompaniment to the house music.  The atmosphere creates an uneasy but positive kind of anticipation of what is to come.

Lights come up to the sound of sharpening knives, accompanied by some twirly accordion music from said musician, and the plot is revealed:  Madame Coochicoo LaDouche (Yvette Parsons), gothically flambouyant owner of run down  raunchy nightclub ‘Gogo’, has committed murder most foul, as an assortment of dismembered limbs illustrates.  In a nonsensical bid to evade the law, she advertises for construction workers to transform the tatty old bar into a church. 

Enter our two hapless working class heroes Toot and Collins (Barnie Duncan and Trygve Wakenshaw), who proceed to bumble their way through the task at hand.  Collins, the tall one as he is no doubt generally known, has the upper hand in status and Toot cowers to his commands as they take stock of what’s there, and what needs removing.  From the start they are falling all over themselves, each other, numerous props, and sometimes Madame Coochicoo too.

Some finer details of the plot were unfortunately lost in the audio mix – Madame Coochicoo, the only talking character, sings most of her lines accompanied by Heinous Crime on the accordion, and I couldn’t distinguish a fair amount of the lyrics. It’s probable there isn’t a great deal of contextual subplot to miss, and if there is it’s not essential to the comedy, although the words I did make out were quite perverse and witty. 

It’s apparent that Duncan and Wakenshaw have a great deal of experience in the art of slapstick, and in particular working together, as they methodically replace the plush crimson surroundings with stark white decor more befitting a place of religious worship.  While Parsons delivers an attitude and energy appropriate to her sinister wench character, she doesn’t match her costars’ sheer technical skill.  Through Geoff Pinfield’s unobtrusive direction, the two heroes are the dominant feature, assisted to that status by the musical genius of  Sam Hamilton’s circus clown meets Clockwork Orange alter ego, Heinous ‘Freejazz’ Crime. 

Heinous (or may I call him Freejazz?) underscores the entire proceedings with freakish tunes and rhythms, scratched and tooted out of various traditional instruments, plus sticks and hunks of metal and so on.  The trashcan alley vaudeville style reminds me of Kurt Weil, Tom Waits’ The Black Rider, and/or local 90’s garage jazz outfit Spacesuit.  Further to this excellent soundtrack, Hamilton supplies foley for the many of the cast’s outrageous antics, to much delightful effect. 

The whole brilliant fiasco is half slapstick, half black comedy, half bawdy musical, half satirical send-up … actually make that a conservative three quarters slapstick.  Yes, that’s a blatant target for any pedant who may care to dispute the maths, but I maintain that this description is accurate.  Adhering to physical reality as we know it is one thing that half this twisted chunk of vaudeville circus mayhem is not.

No, clown logic rules the stage here; a ‘cartooniverse’ if you will, where power drills turn their wielders into robots, or where a tape measure with a couple of sticks becomes a functioning stethoscope in times of need, where hanging ropes resonate like bass guitars and electronic samples if you know how to play them. 

Any lover of the art of clown, or classic anarchic animation a la Tex Avery or Nickelodeon, will undoubtedly have a good laugh here.  Yet for all of Happy Hour for Miserable Children‘s old school homages, pop culture references and obligatory kick-in-the-crotch gags, it manages to be about the most unique theatrical work I have yet reviewed.

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