POLICE COPS: BADASS BE THEY NAME at the VAULT Festival
★★★★
“the physical comedy and the easy rapport with the audience is what we’re all there for.”
Comedy trio Police Cops (Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe) are on a nationwide tear with their latest show Badass Be Thy Name. And to judge from the packed space at the VAULT Festival last night, their audiences can’t get enough of them. With an hour of fast paced comic situations, sight gags, and ingenious costumes—these guys pull off (and pull down) their particular brand of humour with flair. They also pull it off with a bare minimum of staging.
The plot is also barely there. Badass Be Thy Name is a confused mix of a 1990s northern bloke comedy about a man leaving his soul crushing telemarketing job for more meaningful encounters in the Manchester clubbing scene. We know this won’t end well, right? Especially as there has been a series of mysterious murders of young men in the vicinity of the Hacienda Club where Tommy goes to dance away his troubles. In the midst of a medley of good music and even better drugs, (and lots of references to popular culture of the time) our hero encounters the mysterious Father Badass of St. Bartholomew’s. Badass is the man who swoops in to rescue him from a bunch of vampires, and inspires Tommy to sign on to the vampire busting team. From there Badass Be Thy Name devolves into a tale of runaway fathers, and bum baring stepfathers (and other father figures). Tommy and Father Badass take on the lord of the vampires, Satan himself, as Satan attempts to find a portal into 1990s Manchester in a search for better sweets. Does the plot make sense? Not really. But then it doesn’t have to. Because the physical comedy and the easy rapport with the audience is what we’re all there for.
Hunt, Parkinson and Roe switch characters and situations with breathtaking speed. They often flub their lines, corpse, or just give up and give the audience the side eye when they trip themselves up in the scene they’re presenting. Again, it doesn’t matter. It all just makes the audience laugh harder. And their brand of gangly undergraduate humour is what keeps this madcap tale afloat. There are also some genuinely inventive moments involving costumes that become vending machines, socks that become swords (you have to be there) and ziplines. The ziplines are there to deliver action figure stand ins into epic fight situations when the constraints of the Vaults can’t give these guys the Hollywood blockbuster ending they’re searching for. A lot of Police Cops’ appeal is that they give the audience’s imaginations a workout as well.
Badass Be Thy Name is an hour of fast paced fun that will appeal to audiences in search of a nostalgic trip to an imagined Manchester in 1999. Go for the awful puns, references to Lord of the Rings (the earlier, animated one) and some wildly anachronistic, self referential jokes about writing a play and putting it on. There’s something for everyone.
Reviewed on 10th February 2023
by Dominica Plummer
READ THE 2019 POLICE COPS REVIEW BY CLICKING HERE
More VAULT Festival reviews:
Police Cops
The Vaults
Reviewed – 31st January 2019
★★★★
“The sense of fun is infectious, and we therefore forgive, even encourage, the corpsing and occasional adlibbing as they try sometimes to trip each other up”
We’re in a street ‘downtown’ somewhere. Somewhere in America. Somewhere in the Seventies. We know it’s the wrong side of town too. A young rookie Police Cop is cradling his dying older brother, to whom he makes the solemn promise to become “the Best. Damn. Police. Cop. Ever.” The earnest, drawn out, staccato delivery is a perfect parody of every American police movie or television series of that decade, but a mere taster for the next hour during which every nuance, plot twist and cliché are thrown into the back of the car and taken for a ride. And what a roller-coaster ride it is. It’s a ludicrous, hilarious journey.
It is a high-speed chase keeping up with Zachary Hunt, Tom Roe and Nathan Parkinson; the award-winning trio that have brought this show to the VAULT Festival following sell out runs at the Edinburgh Festival and the Soho Theatre. Armed with just sheer ingenuity, stamina and a handful of throwaway props and costumes they don’t let a second of stage time pass by without a gag. The only downside to this is that we have very few spaces to breathe between the laughs.
Political correctness is thrown out of the window from the start. After his brother’s soul has been carried away by the angels, the young cop Jimmy Johnson (Zachary Hunt) sets off to make good his promise. But not without enlisting the help of grizzled, disgraced, chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, ex-cop Harrison (Tom Roe). They have twenty-four hours to track down and ‘take out’ the Mexican drug baron Hernandez (Nathan Parkinson) in his hideaway before the Chief down at the Precinct starts breathing down their necks. Of course, they don’t play by the book; they lose their badges, split up, go it alone, reunite, have a quick ‘bromance’ and eventually sniff out the rat, Hernandez. In the meantime, there is a Flamenco version of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black”, a villainous cat and a trip to Heaven and back, among many other off-the-wall through-stories, back-stories, subplots and moments of losing the plot.
The sense of fun is infectious, and we therefore forgive, even encourage, the corpsing and occasional adlibbing as they try sometimes to trip each other up. They have earned the right to that playfulness by being masters of their craft in the same way highly skilled jazz musicians can wander off on a tangent, yet fall back in time with the rest of the band within a beat. A musical analogy that can be extended to their physicality, too, displayed in some quite remarkably skilful, yet still tongue-in-cheek, choreography.
“Police Cops” is a real joyride of a show, and just as the intrepid cops are cleaning up the streets, I sense too that they will also clean up at the awards.
Reviewed by Jonathan Evans
Photography courtesy Police Cops
Police Cops
Part of VAULT Festival 2019
