Fringe Frolics

The Wellington Fringe festival has been upon us – from the 1^st to 23^rd March – and we’ve been to see a few things. Nicola has also been helping out with the organisation, by taking tickets, payments and generally pointing people in the right direction. Like fringe festivals everywhere, the standard of the material can be variable, but we were mostly entertained by the shows we went to see. One of the performers we wanted to see, Tessa Waters, was cancelled, for unspecified reasons. Hopefully she’ll be back in the comedy festival later in the year.

2 Ruby Knockers, 1 Jaded Dick

This is a one-man show by Tim Motley as Dirk Darrow, a hard-boiled private dick in the style of Marlowe or Hammer, with a good line in bad jokes. He also does magic, starting the show by asking us to answer some questions on a card, and then cold reading people in the audience to see if he’s got it right. He plays all the characters in the mystery of Ruby Knockers, a bank robbery and a murder; it’s all interspersed with card tricks, bad puns, a misfiring gun, and real, genuine, magic at the end. We were rolling, and sometimes groaning, in the aisles. Definitely one to watch – he’s been hawking this and other shows in the same vein around the fringe circuit since 2014, but this is his first time in New Zealand. Hopefully he’ll come back.

The Mournmoor Murders

This is a two-hander performed by Alice May Connolly and Maria Williams, at BATS theatre’s Studio. They play all the characters in a mash-up between Midsomer Murders and New Zealand’s own Brokenwood Mysteries. There’s been a murder in Mournmoor, and two detectives from the Big City (Timaru) are sent to investigate. Cultural references abound as the bodies pile up, but, incredibly, they managed to miss out saying “there’s more ‘n’ more murders happening”. This was more miss than hit, as they only seemed to have one volume (high) and one emotion (histrionic), which got a bit wearing after a while. All their mates from drama school were in the audience with them, giggling at them even when they weren’t trying to be funny. Good concept, poor execution.

The Man Who Was Thursday

A classic GK Chesterton story, performed by one man in the form of Peter Coates, this follows the investigation and infiltration of the Organisers Of Anarchy, an anarchist organisation. There’s poetry, anarchy, cross and doublecross, and characters named after days of the week. What’s not to like? It shows what you can do when you have a decent script to work with, and Coates plays all the characters convincingly.  Good fun.

How To Win A Pub Quiz

This is a one-man comedy show, where Alex Love demonstrates how to win at pub quiz. Spoiler alert: the trick is to remember facts and information. He then gave us some facts, including a recitation of the fifty states of the USA in alphabetical order, followed up by the periodic table: “gold, silver, copper, tin, aluminium…and all the others”. Easy. He also demonstrated the use of his “fact bell”, which he rang every time there was a genuine fact. He then got us into teams (we were joined by the lady sat next to us, Jackie), and we did a pub quiz. Some of the questions were hard, and he did set out to trick us a bit. One of his techniques was to deduct points from teams for bad behaviour, answering back etc. – there was a rather rambunctious team in the front row who started the quiz on a score of -4. The audience were encouraged to assist this with a chant of “Take one off! Take one off!” if anyone was misbehaving. We finished a creditable third equal (out of around 20 teams), let down by our lack of knowledge about Smurfs and S Club 7 songs.