Nina Conti and her rude monkey sidekick are back. An unhinged, sweary puppet and the gracious, apologetic puppeteer: they’re a dynamic duo, that’s for sure.
This time, the pair are on a mission to help the audience find love, and they won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. As well as being a ventriloquist – and an extremely skilled multi-tasker — Conti is also a matchmaker. She pulls up audience members and smacks on a caricature-ish new face, transforming them into ridiculous new personalities via a moving mouth mask, before introducing them to other willing lonely hearts.
She’ll swap between Scottish, southern, and Italian accents with ease. She takes the piss out of a couple’s meeting story and speed-learns life facts, saving tasty titbits to dish out later. It’s clever improv, and Conti remains impressively aloof: cool, calm and collected, she’s working frantically behind her smile to (literally) pull the strings and make it all work.
Laughing at your mate getting laughed at on stage is the oldest trick in the book, and the audience was in bits when I saw it. But once you get over Conti’s impeccable puppetry skills, not all of the sketches really do that much. When Conti pulls a blanket over her head and takes the monkey on a speed date, it’s just chaos. People are brutally chased off, insults are thrown around… but the comments aren’t particularly quick-witted.
Luckily, a swap to her own warm demeanour brings some sense of order back to it all. But the intense ‘dance it out’ finale, swapping rapidly between a large group of audience members, ended abruptly as the show ran out of time, and the effect was lost. Conti’s not going to lose her ventriloquist crown any time soon, and she and monkey still finished the show triumphant – but only just.
