George Fenn’s act is denoted in the publicity as “interactive comedy” and it is indeed a mix of practiced routines with improv, involving interactings with specific audience-members, whether seated or drawn into the acting space.

It’s risky, depending on his own gift of the gab and people-skills to make things work, and there’s sometimes a sense of thin ice. Yet work they do, and the sheer chutzpah of it is often quite funny. 

His primary subject is not the impersonation of anyone else, but his own performing self, performing. And his is a very likeable, appealingly odd, certainly courageous self. To carry it off requires focus, timing, self-exposure.  

There’s variety here, with the escape of the ‘inner child,’ and parody of the routines of the comic stage-magician. ‘Force’ is, as in the energy-drink, a bottle-full of it visibly consumed in one swallow. To say more would be to get into spoiler territory. 

Anyway, it does work, it’s enjoyable, it’s brave, and one wishes Fenn well. 

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My experience of G+Force begins about twenty minutes before it opens. I’m enjoying a pre-show beer outside BATS’ front entrance, when a young guy with a guitar approaches our group and starts chatting away to the of girls next to me. “George” he says – referring to George Fenn, G+Force’s sole performer and creator – “asked me to be in his show tonight. He asked me today to just turn up and play something. I don’t know much more than that”.

This insight into the way Fenn works is telling. His slightly improvised, broad-brush approach is evident in G+Force, as it is in all of his work. “I’m kind of any edgy artist,” Fenn claims early on, and his show lives up to that claim by breaking or dispensing with theatrical ‘rules’ as quickly as it can find them. By my count, G+Force has at least three attempts at a conventional prologue.

It uses house lights to oscillate abruptly between abstracted images and narratives, and a repeated section that is something akin to a friendly chat. It plays host to an extended exchange between Fenn and his sister, as they debate the merits of different ways to claim ownership over teabags.

As we approach the end Fenn’s aforementioned musical maestro re-emerges to distract us with a ditty while Fenn primes his next round of theatrical volunteers with instructions.

G+Force is weird. Fenn argues fiercely against it being labelled as abstract, but abstract or not, G+Force is weird.

What makes G+Force remarkable is how comfortable the opening night audience clearly is with how weird it all is. The experience seems to be having a liberating effect on the audience, and people are throwing themselves into G+Force’s shenanigans with abandon. I’ve genuinely not seen an audience this empowered for a while, and if that is one of Fenn’s aims, then he seems to have found the sweet spot.

G+Force is rough, and unashamedly so – that’s part of the conceit of the work. At times it wanders a little aimlessly – I think there’s a real need for the scientific content from which the show takes its premise to be unpacked further – but in general G+Force is well received, and verges on eliciting something quite special from its audience. There’s enough in it to chase, and I’m interested in seeing how Fenn develops it. 

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