A Comedy – Brown Council
A Comedy by Brown Council, presented by Vitalstatistix Theatre.
If you’ve read the description for A Comedy, you have a fairly good idea of what its about to do. The show attempts to expose the malicious, dark humour and makes you wonder just what kind of person you are for laughing at a show where people are doing incredibly awkward/embarrassing things; so that you can laugh at them.
I must admit, I didn’t fully understand what the show was about till roughly 40mins in to my first sitting; and it takes A LOT of self coaxing to willingly throw a tomato at a performer on stage. But that’s when you kind of realize that what the show is about… I think!
These are endurance shows in more ways than one; the show starts at 7pm, and you are able to enter or leave on the hour, however the show does not stop. They do a quick sweep of the floor, change hosts and say hello to their new guests while people are departing. If you only stay for one show, you do not fully experience this show. I can not stress that enough, YOU MUST STAY.
Audience participation (which is always a little daunting for me) is a big part of the show. My guest and I were selected a couple of times to get involved. He pushed a cream pie into one of the performers faces while I got involved in an awkward 3 way cream pie extravaganza which resulted in my face and hair completely covered in whipped cream. Big props to @OohLala_says from @vitalstheatreco for being on hand with the wet ones. THANK YOU!
These young ladies work so damn hard, they perform non-stop for 4 hours and they are always on. You will be wondering what the heck is going on, but stay with it. They are amazing women. My favorite acts were Dancing Monkey and Slap Stick & Cream Pie (purely because I got involved LOL). The ending is a little odd, but is the perfect point to remember what you are doing there.
A Comedy by Brown Council is playing a VERY limited run of dates at Queens Theatre (Playhouse Lane) on the following dates: 4, 5, 9 & 11 March. Tickets here.
So does the show restart every hour or is it four hours worth of different stuff?
The show restarts each hour, but the performers “tag team” hosting and performing duties, and the show changes as you select different acts from the list, which each performer then attempts to make their own.
I have to say that, whilst I loved the performance, I hated the experience of sitting through A Comedy… because of the audience. For me, it broke with too many of the conventions of the theatre, letting the experience devolve into a rabble… an excuse to for the audience to let all the aspects of selfishness and self-importance (that are usually kept under wraps) out.
And that type of behaviour… well, that’s not why I go to the theatre.
Call me an old fuddy-duddy if you like, but I’m really struggling to figure out what I’m supposed to take away from A Comedy. The audience outcomes are almost pre-determined (and a corollary to the Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory) – my group (second for the evening) had watched the first group reluctantly “get involved” towards the end of the first hour via the TV in the bar; as a result, the first tomatoes had been thrown before the second hour had even begun. The closing lineup was bedlam, with the crowd trying to take out the sign, beer bottles on the table, the timer… what’s the point of that? What are those people taking away from the experience?
Because I left knowing that there were a bunch of people on my side of the audience/performer divide that I would never, ever, choose to speak to ever again. I left feeling that I’d just shared a performance with a pack of arseholes.
Still, at least we’re all talking about it. And, to be honest, I’m bloody glad it’ll be months before I’m chronologically ready to write my post on A Comedy (it was show #94 for me; I’ve only just started writing about #37). I need the time to just continually mull on it, and perhaps temper my ill feelings towards it.
Do we have to take something away from a performance? What if performance leaves no impact on half of it’s audience? Does that make it bad? Can’t we just enjoy a show, can’t we all just get along. :-p
Yeah, the final part is a bit awkward, and yes people during our show also went a little too far, thankfully i didnt attend with arseholes, but i think what you experience (the throwing of tomato’s at signs, beer bottles etc) are also part of the experience, at what point does it turn from comedy and laughter into something more sinisiter.
thanks for your informative posts peteskiau and festival freak – I love that A Comedy has several of us quite empassioned.
Unlike each of you I LOVED the tomato-throwing. I find it so interesting that some audiences went overboard, really getting into the tomatoes, and others (like my night) were quite timid. Personally, I don’t mind a bit of riff-raff at the theatre. I like disolving into chaos. I think we can think we are more civilised than this, attending the capital T Theatre – and then realise, no, we are just like the Romans watching a lion eat a man and cheering with blood lust! Didn’t you love the slapping? So wrong! I love the extremes that Brown Council take us to – it’s such a welcome relif from an ordered life. I love pushing the boundaries – not just the performers, but us as well, the spectators were invited to push boundaries.
Bring on the Brown Council! Let us witness our riff-raff selves.
Oh, I loved the slapping – that was a challenging experience. What I didn’t like was the audience throwing tomatoes at the performers heads during the slapping. That felt like the boundaries were just being completely ignored.
But wasn’t that the point too? That we DO overstep boundaries? That we live in such a regimented, dare I say it, Nanny society, that we must repress all our boundary-crossing. Brown Council gave us an opportunity to see ourselves – to see that we will overstep boundaries if we can (we’re in the dark, they’re the performers).
I agree that it may have been off-putting to watch people ‘ruin’ the show by sitting in the dark and tossing off (hehe) tomatoes. But it’s so interesting that this audience member wanted to particpate in the violence. I love the sense off ‘this is not on the script!’ that occured during this show. We saw ourselves as much as we saw the performers