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From pub recreations of Wild West gunfights to hilariously lo-fi homages to the stunts of Evel Knievel, experimental theatre duo Action Hero have turned their endearing obsession with American culture into a fascinating career.
In some ways, the subject of new show ‘Hoke’s Bluff’ feels like an inevitability: is there anything more quintessentially American than the world of high school football – that’s American football – and the hopes, the dreams, the stereotypes and the cheerleading formations that come with it?
Well, yes and no – much of the power of Action Hero’s previous work has come from the pointed disconnect between their deadpan Anglo delivery and the absurd, sometimes troublesome machismo of the American tropes they’re interrogating.
Here, it feels like they’ve lost some of that detachment: Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse seem to be having so much fun rattling through lists of amusing made-up small towns and funny imaginary football formations (there’s one called ‘Home Alone 2’) that they blend into this world in a way they’ve not in their previous work. Perhaps part of the issue is how familiar American high school culture now feels to most Brits, but whatever the case, ‘Hoke’s Bluff’ has a tendency to feel more like homage than exploration.
Nonetheless, their overt Englishness and genuine enthusiasm does lend a freshness to the clichés they bust out to spin a yarn about a star football player suffering from small-town ennui. ‘Hoke’s Bluff’ is inventive, laugh out loud funny, and takes on a poignancy in its final sections that reminded me of the Almeida’s current, gorgeous revival of Thornton Wilder’s everyman epic ‘Our Town’.