“will have real potential when it finds its focus, and chooses a direction”
Jude (Sarah Mayhew) never married. She never had kids. For her, these things were never a priority. She doesn’t hate children, but she does hate smug mums with superiority complexes. One day, when one such mum and her wild, screaming children are blocking the till at a café where she’s trying to order coffee, and the mum suggests Jude is intruding on them and their ‘creative time’, Jude snaps. She and the mum get into an altercation that results in a pram being kicked rather forcefully. Although the pram was empty (Jude isn’t a monster), the incident lands her in anger management therapy, which she attends with her sister Susie (Sadie Hasler) for support.
Old Trunk Theatre’s Pramkicker, written by Hasler, examines the various pressures and difficulties faced by modern women. However, instead of one articulate narrative, the play feels like a jumble of pieces that are not cohesive in tone, style, or even theme. They could be extracts from different scripts. It’s a promising intro: the pram-kicking incident is funny and a creative illustration of the stand-off between mothers and ‘childfree’ women. There’s some well-executed physical comedy between Mayhew and Hasler as they acted it out. We want to know what happens next.
But the play quickly veers off the path, and we are suddenly with Jude’s sister, who tells us about her childhood. The therapy sessions inexplicably morph into a talk show before they (along with an odd voiceover from a therapist) disappear altogether. Then Jude is telling us about the time she lived with Russian prostitutes and cocaine-dealing gangsters. It’s scattered, messy storytelling. Each jarring jerk of the steering wheel makes us less certain Hasler knows where she’s going. The assorted sections are interesting in their own right, but it’s difficult to feel invested in what’s happening as we are pulled roughly from each scene and carelessly tossed somewhere else. The abrupt transitions are emphasised by harsh, blinding white light.
Non-linear storytelling is a stylistic choice, but there is a question of whether Pramkicker is an actual story more than a cobbling together of disjointed anecdotes. The individual scenes display considerable writing skill – there are moments of impressive spoken word performance – but it seems there was little effort made to shape them into something coherent.
Pramkicker takes on a multitude of urgent, controversial topics about the ways in which women relate to society, motherhood, and each other. It will have real potential when it finds its focus, and chooses a direction.
“Built on the irresistibility and sheer gall of the two contrasting comics they achieve a good degree of buy-in from the audience”
In its maze of neon and graffiti clad theatres and bars spreading like a psychedelic moss beneath Waterloo station, VAULT Festival is the perfect emblem of a London creative culture clinging to any unclaimed surface and proliferating in every crevice. This year the festival reaches new heights of aspiration with digital screens, airport style announcements of performances about to begin and earnest figures with ear pieces and tablets directing the subterranean human traffic. Apocalyptic train sounds and dank smells arguably add to a unique fringe atmosphere, whose spirit and energy come from breakthrough acts, experimental theatre and promising new comedy shows like Fool Britannia, the surreal comedy vehicle of Neil Frost and Dan Lees.
The show opens with Dan Lees in gown and mortar board, standing before a hand-made school lectern (motto: Ludum est fun) delivering a faintly silly start of term address. Neil Frost then appears as a gurning man-child supply teacher, and between them they embark on educating the audience on an utterly nonsensical history of the British Isles. Firstly, they change into cartoon cavemen brandishing inflatable clubs, then Hadrian and his builder (with inflatable hammer), then Vikings, rowing a hand drawn boat with wooden spoons singing ‘We’re Viking’s – and so on. Each period is simplified to nothingness, reaching a peak with Neil Frost as Shakespeare wearing a hand-folded paper ruff simply enjoining the audience to say ‘Shakespeare’. Occasionally they digress for sketches of affable randomness until the whole timeline and premise of the show is abandoned for some more school-based sketches, audience participation and a smattering of improvisation.
Their act is a classic comedy duo blending Pete and Dud with the dodgy props and wild invention of Vic and Bob, plus a suggestion of Lee and Herring and even, for aficionados, The National Theatre of Brent. The difference is that, apart from a Dan Lees ballad about St George and The Dragon, there’s not much sense in this show that any of the sketches have actually been written. It’s more a sequence of first thoughts on the back on an envelope. Sounds terrible? Yes, but the lack of bother, point or preparation is the joke and the Pythonesque method of undermining each premise as soon as it’s established succeeds in keeping the audience engaged, never knowing what to expect and not knowing where any gag is going. Built on the irresistibility and sheer gall of the two contrasting comics they achieve a good degree of buy-in from the audience. In any case, as they breezily acknowledge in asides while sidling around the stage as Vikings, ‘it’s not for everyone’.
