Theatre

I am led down the spiral staircase into a gloomy cellar. A pack of slickly dressed mafiosi stop laughing and slapping each other on the back. The Godfather looks me up and down, and nods to his henchman, who beckons to me to sit down. The Godfather stares, rubbing his hands. Then he smiles, winks and chuckles. ‘Very po-mo, don’t you think?

’The Godfather is Chris Goode, pioneering artistic director of renegade theatre company Signal To Noise, and by ‘po-mo’, he means postmodern. He is referring to the rather ludicrous proposition of a playwright and critic pretending to be an actor pretending to be a mafia boss. Which is where I find myself, in the middle of a weird po-mo performance in which members of the Fringe mafia enact a spoof ‘Godfather’ scene at a table. Who this is aimed at is unclear – hen nights would seem to be the best proposition – but now they are performing to a table of Time Out critics and assorted acerbic friends. If the Algonquin Round Table were transported to the modern day, I would hope it might find somewhere with a bit more character than Pizza Express on Charlotte Street, but tonight the critics are slinging their bons mots over blue-lit chicken salads (£8.50). Feature continues

Chris Goode has forged a reputation for theatrical form-busting. If it is outside of a proscenium arch, he’ll do it. In 2000 he directed a production of ‘The Tempest’ with a cast of six, which took place in people’s houses. He recently reprised the in-house performance with the rapturously received ‘We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg’, in which he visited audiences in their homes and presented a show that was part-performance, part-storytelling, part-psychoanalysis. Much of Goode’s success is down to his considerable charm, his compendious mind, and a benign demeanour which puts his actors into a state of creative confidence and playfulness.

He collaborates on this project with promising talents, most of whom he has worked with before: Gemma Brockis (who does a mean Marlon Brando, complete with dough balls in the cheeks), Hida Eusébio, and Tom Lyall and Greg McLaren, who have perfected the dumb, combative henchmen schtick to a tee. Within the given remit of ‘a 15-minute spoof of “The Godfather”’, Goode is rightly restrained. People don’t want a 15 -minute ‘Medea’, or other such heavy fare. They want something that is charming, unobtrusive, witty, and which disappears as stealthily as it arrived – with Don Forchese being led out onto the street having had his consignment of lemons sniffily rejected by the imperious Don Broccolione. The script, therefore, has been knocked up in the spirit of off-the-cuff improvisation, and contains choice moments (an attempted hit with a giant pepper grinder), but it gives enough leeway for the actors to improvise around the events as they unravel.

Prior to this evening’s performance, the troupe spent the day performing across London’s infinitely varied Pizza Express outlets. They have worked out the kind of audiences to expect – some will hush up, while others will carry on chatting and ignore them. Both kinds of experience are equally valid to Goode, who sees the work as part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of public and private spaces – about a sense of ‘what theatre can be civically’. The honourable egalitarian ethos that underpins all his work is that ‘there is no difference between us, there is no barrier’. He wants a version of the theatre that acknowledges the audience are in the same space – that makes them feel that ‘you can do this too’.

In which case they have succeeded. I left feeling that I could definitely do this too. Partly because I had. (Although my friend did question the nationality of my Russian Mafioso, with vowels floundering out East – more Caucasus than Casa Nostra.) But I also feel cheated, as if I had been presented with an enormous pizza base with no filling. There’s a fascinating form here taking precedence over little content.
That’s not the fault of Goode or the actors, however, who are just following a brief. If we cut the wheat from the chaff, or the dough from the balls, this whole shebang is just a glorified advert to launch the new Il Padrino menu. Which is weirdly self-defeating. Because by the time they had finished, my colleague’s pizza had gone cold.

www.ilpadrinoexpress.co.uk