It’s too early to call likely winners in the NZ Fringe Festival 2018 awards, but The Nose has to be a strong contender for Comedy with the highest rate of gags per minute. It’s a blizzard, a lolly scramble, a shotgun blast of funny bits fired out from the stage at high velocity for the audience to field or dodge as best they can.

The Nose is an adaptation of the short story by Nikolai Gogol: a Russian bureaucrat loses his nose, which not only takes on a life of its own but achieves more success than its original owner. Potts and Trigg have transported the story from 1830s Russia to Wellington in 2018 with its grotesque premise and satirical attitude intact. 

It’s not often you see the word ‘Shakespearean’ applied to locally grown comedy shows, but there’s a first time for everything, so here goes – this is comedy in the Shakespeare mould: ingenious, bawdy, satirical, densely packed, full of wordplay, often hilariously funny, sometimes obscure. You can imagine the scholarly edition of The Nose script: three or four lines of actual text per page, and under that, a mass of footnotes explaining the contemporary references.

The point about the footnotes is that most of The Nose’s targets are highly topical and specific to central Wellington and the things that central Wellingtonians consider interesting, annoying, or otherwise worthy of attention (sour beer; Pakeha/Maori relations; slam poets; hip cafes and bars (of course); Stuff; Uber; Tinder; gender stereotyping; satirical comedies about Wellington; etc, etc). You don’t have to be a young, cool, craft beer drinking, Tinder-using liberal/ sceptical Wellingtonian to enjoy The Nose, but it definitely helps.

Lots of targets and lots of comic devices; again, a full list would be excessively long, but we get slapstick, puns, comic songs, parodies, fantasy… So many jokes, so little time. The pace of the show tends to be fast and loud. This serves to carry the audience along in the rush. It also means that gags sometimes get trampled in the stampede, particularly in the scenes involving Alex Greig as the distressed (because nose-free) bureaucrat.

Does that matter? We can guess that director Michael Trigg’s attitude is: if you don’t get the joke /reference of the moment, the next one is crowding behind, and then there’s another one coming straight after that, and so on. Still, there’s a sneaking suspicion that some bits might work better if they were given more weight.

There’s a lot of comic talent and experience on the stage in this show; Alex Greig in full frenzy as the central character; multitalented Bronwyn Turei and her little guitar; Maria Williams dancing up a storm; cheerful, deadpan Jerome Chandrahasen; and the wonderfully elastic Jake Brown. Brown is popular with the crowd; and shows good skills in staying in character when the rest of the theatre is laughing at his material. Jonny Potts is exactly right as the sardonic, philosophical narrator. Hilary Penwarden features as the Nose.

The script (Potts, Trigg) doesn’t take itself too seriously, covers a lot of satirical ground in 60 minutes, and scores more often than it misses its mark.

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