It’s not really the Fringe without some Cambridge Footlights alumnus tripping off on a wacky conceptual flight of fancy, and ex Vice President Adrian Gray does so in nice fashion, displaying lots of good old English eccentricity, but none of the hyper-confident smart-assedness that afflicts some from his alma mater. Besides, he’s been putting that education to good use – Gray is now a “truth theorist”, and the “truth” that he has found, and plans to share with us tonight, lies hidden in a little-known James Bond film from 2001, a film that incredibly, none of the audience have ever heard of…
To get us onside, he lets us in on some of the truths he’s already discovered – minor inconveniences being laid at the door of corporations, chance occurrences being the hand of the illuminati at work. Some of these come at us as one-liners, some as brief Powerpoint slides, but it’s all inventive, tickling the ribs from different directions. He sets up his persona well – to himself, he’s the enlightened one who just needs us all to see what he’s seen; to us, he’s a neurotic blusterer, who may yet prove to be an idiot-savant.
The bulk of the show is spent unravelling this Bond film no-one’s ever seen. Here, he switches into Partridge “Stop getting Bond wrong!” mode, acting us through the film, scene by surreal scene. He looks like he’s enjoyed putting this bit together, possibly too much. He layers on extra dollops of ridiculousness after the basic premise has been well-established. Then, once he reaches bits he can’t act out, he switches to a youtube channel where other Bond mega-geeks give their takes on the film, which, in diverging from his, begin to induce crippling self-doubt. It all helps ramp up the speed and the tension as we head for the climax where we find how delusional he really is…
Gray’s put together a busy, buzzy hour which, with its tech and pop cultural references lands better with the millennials than the handful of older (Bond fans?) in the audience. A little tightening up around the middle might help the dynamics, but there’s much to enjoy about it.