With arts correspondent Bella Bartock entertaining her Wagnerian fantasies at Bayreuth (don’t ask), ANDREW PELLING, Inside Croydon’s contributing editor was sent off to a pre-Edinburgh Festival review at the Scream Lounge
The cast of How the World Wags, Michael Hall, left, Sarah Block, Owen Moore and David Sanders
What a delight is the Scream Lounge, on Brighton Road at South End, with its small performance space upstairs and the opportunity to deport yourself on the chaise longue while enjoying a pre-show refreshment.
The box office is friendly, too. When collecting my pre-paid ticket it was nice to see my name on the list as “Andrew Pelling (yes, that one)”. Comedy gold from the start.
How the World Wags is a comedy review which last night got its first outing ahead of a run at the Edinburgh Festival next month. By far the best part of the show is that the You Tube version of Hürda Gürda Mürder is so splendidly brought live to the stage.
Gum-chewing Sarah Block is a convincingly efficient Danish detective in her Nordic jumper. Michael Hall’s hang-dog look shows that Croydon’s comic foursome master visual comedy well.
But much of the comedy is of a fast moving wordsmith variety as seen in a posh Radio 4 interviewer being given the Radio5Live job of quizzing a footballer, and then insisting on correcting each grammatical error that the player utters.
David Sanders, who on stage looks like a rather too haughty, tall and self-possessed barrister, plays off well against Hall, Block and Owen Moore in his studied Englishness.
Indeed a lot of the juxtaposition in the comedy is about class and jarring manners. It’s well studied humour in this respect.
I hope that this type of class distinction joking around together mixed with quips about commuting to London, both of which are well understood by Croydon residents, will not get lost in translation north of the border.
I have often found outsiders don’t understand our self-deprecating jokes about chavs.
For sure. Jag gillade det.
- Monday, July 23 is Croydon’s final chance to see the show before it moves on to Edinburgh. Starting at 8pm, the show lasts an hour, tickets cost £5 and can be booked by emailing htwwtickets@hotmail.com. They say that “there is some mature content”, so don’t bring under-14s.
- And there is also a website: www.howtheworldwags.co.uk
- Inside Croydon: For comment and analysis about Croydon, from inside Croydon
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