If anyone could pull off a five-man show about the Baader-Meinhof gang, a seventeenth-century troupe of acrobats, a 1930s shop selling corned beef and sex aids, the characters in ‘Are You Being Served?’ and Bugs Bunny, it is Told by an Idiot. But the larger-than-life company has overextended itself with its barmy latest. This tale has the madcap manner and sound that fans expect, with a dollop of anarchist fury, but it is so unhinged that it ends up signifying nothing.
The first 30 minutes are fun. The irrepressible cast pops up all over Sophia Clist’s set, which looks like Indiana Jones’s boudoir (all sand-coloured pillars, hats and severed hands).
In 1970s Germany, a professor inspires his student to commit an atrocity in the local department store with a lecture, promisingly entitled ‘Enlightenment by Demonstration.’ Next, they all staff the store, playing ‘Are You Being Served?’ characters while speaking German with full-on regional British accents. It’s giggly stuff, especially when three of the cast lip-sync a birthday party scene in which a glum ex-Cossack dad impales himself on an imaginary sabre (the 1930s voices for this scenario are supplied by their mic-ed colleagues).
But you can’t run a 110-minute show on tics and pranks alone. The preposterously talented company shake themselves silly to evoke a gale and impersonate terrorists, dogs, meerkats and Louis XIV. But Paul Hunter and Hayley Carmichael’s story is a bombsite.
The performers teeter on the edge of cartoon precipices, but there’s no bridge between the five wildly different scenarios. Trying to follow their leaps and bounds is tiring and, eventually, soporific. Two intriguing attempts to shake the audience out of its bourgeois complacency backfire, because the show is just too busy to support them.
This is brainstorm theatre: it scribbles its ideas about extremism with anarchic glee, but is illegible to anyone but the authors. You can’t fault the demonstration. But there’s little enlightenment here.