Stalin performance: Emmy Fyles in one-woman show Not Like That – You’re Doing It Wrong at Stanley Arts takes a stab at the patriarchy, all with the help of a PowerPoint presentation
FRINGE REVIEW: As the Croydonites festival enters its final two days, KEN TOWL (Croydon’s answer to Tynan), pictured right, conducts a compare and contrast of two of the shows this week, and marks your card for tonight and tomorrow, and for Edinburgh next month
We are a month away from the start of the Edinburgh Fringe, the largest arts festival in the known universe. We in Croydon are 400 miles away from the nearest Edinburgh Fringe venue, so we are lucky to have the Croydonites Fringe on our doorstep.
Croydonites Fringe in many cases showcases acts that are bound for Scotland, often having a final run-through in south London before heading north. This week, I saw two of them, one called Emmy (book your Edinburgh tickets here), the other Emma (or here).
Both of them promised a PowerPoint presentation. Other slideshow software packages may be available, but I’ve never heard of one.
One of them was very funny, one of them quite disturbing. So, not a bad sample of the Scottish festival to come.
Emmy Fyles introduced herself at Stanley Arts on Wednesday as the second most-famous Fyles after Epstein, and she told us that her ex-, Peter, had baulked at the idea of a post-nuptial taking of her surname.
Fyles’ show, Not Like That – You’re Doing It Wrong, is an hour’s worth of a very witty, on-point jeremiad on the travails of being a woman in the patriarchy.
After a bit of a shaky start – this is, essentially, a practice show before the Edinburgh dates – Fyles left her nerves behind and got into her groove. I hesitate to repeat too many of her bons mots – and she packed in a lot of laughs per minute – because you really ought to hear them delivered to you at breakneck speed on the terrace of the Alchemist in the St James Quarter, bang in the centre of Edinburgh (and no more than a skip and a jump from the Café Royal, one of Auld Reekie’s great pubs).
HR disaster: Pauline was looking for local people for local jobs
Fyles took the audience with her on a whirlwind tour of the patriarchy and hacked away at its pernicious influence on all of our lives. And to be clear, her target was the patriarchy itself, not men. Well, not all men, perhaps.
Andrew Tate was an easy target, of course, a great way to unify a diverse room full of Stanley Arts liberals and, while watching Andrew Tate trying to dance in an amateur video, offered schadenfreude in abundance. I truly would like to be able to unsee it. I profoundly regret that I never will.
Women were targeted, too, in the form of faux-emoting influencers and Fyles was incisive and merciless in her takedown of this class of pseudo-celebrity.
Go to Edinburgh, too, to hear Fyles’ exposé of the poor behaviour of a sexually rejected MP and what he did to her colleague’s handbag back when they worked in the Houses of Parliament.
Fyles pithily described her slideshow act as being like “a corporate awayday but with no free pastries”.
Emma Davies might have said the same about You Are All Resources, her satire on HR which was staged at the Front Room on St George’s Walk on Thursday. The pastries would have been the least of our worries, though.
Redundancy package: Emma Davies as Alllyson Pope in her pre-Edinburgh show performed at The Front Room
In Alllyson (with three ululating Ls) Pope, Davies has created a grotesque figure, the bastard daughter, perhaps, of Alan Partridge and Pauline, the manager of the Royston Vasey JobCentre in The League of Gentlemen.
Davies’s comedy is very physical. Whereas Fyles stands up and delivers carefully honed verbal barbs, Davies uses all of the space in the venue, a whirlwind of powder blue, matching power suit and eye makeup.
The set-up is this: We, the audience, are employees at Remark Insurance and Alllyson Pope is the member of the human resources department tasked with revealing which of us are to be made redundant. “It’s not personal,” we are told, “It’s Personnel.”
This is very much a work-in- progress. There are good lines, but not all of them land. Ahead of Edinburgh, Davies will need to refine this act. A character like Alllyson Pope deserves a lot of care. Some parts of the show just don’t work. They don’t land because they don’t fly in the first place.
When beloved centenarian Sir David Attenborough’s photo appeared on a slide, we were told that this was an old manager who had struggled with technology. He was then voiced by Davies at length in a strange accent that I can best describe as East European Vampire Stereotype.
There appeared to be no reason for this. Are foreign accents intrinsically funny? Are vampires funny? Quite a lot of the time I found myself just not getting it.
At several points, Davies appeared to lose track of where she was. Once, she said to the tech guy at the back of the room, “I’ve lost my train of thought. Put the next slide on and I’ll remember.” A more charitable reading of this would be that it was Alllyson Pope rather than Emma Davies who was floundering.
Difficult to care though, since Pope had no redeeming qualities at all. Pathos can only work where a character has at least something we can identify with. Even Alan Partridge and Pauline have elements of humanity that help to make them real. They are not just resources, they are human, too.
With a bit of judicious editing, and a sharpened delivery, this could be quite a biting satire on the excesses of corporate culture and the awful, awful people who populate HR departments up and down the country. If you go to Edinburgh to see it, my advice would be to pick one of the later dates and see it after the show has had the rough edges knocked off.
In the meantime, and without having to splash out a ton on train fare, there are still more Croydonites treats in store this weekend. See the programme here. I’m looking forward to spending some time in The Oval Tavern this evening, where there are shows at 6pm, 7.15pm and 8pm, the last of these being a spoken word showcase that performer Johnny Dobbyn describes here.
Poetry and pints? Sounds like a plan.
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