I’m nuts about the HBO TV series GAME OF THRONES so I was very excited to discover this comedy sketch show, promising to parody it. I caught up with it two nights after press night and have been intrigued since to notice a couple of rave reviews on the internet.These three fictional, well meaning, amateur performers then present a scrappily staged run for the Big Mac and potential investors, utilising tatty props and costumes and bickering over the content and casting.
You’ll need to be a Thrones fan to get the majority of the jokes they perform in their show within a show which re-enacts incidents from all four of the seasons shown on TV so far and even attempt to guess how the final series will climax, something that, in real-life, is a closely guarded secret. It’s a rather credible suggestion too!
I quite enjoyed the character’s cack-handed sketches about the show; the title sequences presented through bad interpretive dance and cagoules! the impressions, the tricks to make the performer playing the dwarf Tyrian appear smaller than anyone else, the bilingual love scenes... I’d have happily watched an evening of this stuff, all be it performed with unintentional and uncomfortable moments when the laughs stop and the atmosphere in the tiny, basement venue plummets.
Unfortunately there’s more to it than this, you also have to enjoy the backstage squabbling of the trio and, personally, I didn’t.
For me the problem was that I just didn't warm to them. Both Ali Price as Graeme and Mark Davison as Paul both play dour, po-faced straight-men oblivious to the show’s flaws. One such character would have been funny but when there’s two they cancel each other out. Libby Northedge is so shrill and aggressive as Bryony that she became about as likeable as the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard. If you don’t like or care about anyone it’s hard to keep engaged when they’re not parodying GAME OF THRONES.
I may well have seen a performance that just didn’t spark. Comedy can be like that sometime and I’m quite prepared to accept things were riotously funny on press night, packed with the cast’s mates but two days later the whole thing was a very hit and miss affair.
It suffers badly in comparison with PETER PAN GOES WRONG at the Lyric Theatre around the corner, in which highly-skilled professional actors perfectly capture the idiosyncrasies of amateur performers, whilst never letting the comic momentum drop, making you fall in love with them.
I know many of you will have already considered how much Shakespeare’s MACBETH could be improved by the insertion of interpretive dance and hip-hop music.