@ Assembly George Square Theatre Box, until Sun 30 Aug @ 15:20
A breathless hour, exhausting to watch, nigh on heart-attack inducing to perform, Goose: Kablamo, is not a show to be entered into lightly. It has the feel of a 45 being played at 78 (and if you’re old enough to get that reference, here’s hoping you’ve done your brain training, because this one strains the grey matter).
It’s loosely, very loosely, an action film spoof, with regular angular diversions Family Guy-style, but so many comedy bases are touched upon – wordplay, surrealism, parody, meta-humour, call-backs, social commentary – it goes way beyond this. Although there are musicians and technical whizz-kids in the house, Goose is essentially Adam Drake, a lithe, fidgety performer who adopts dozens of different characters – a wannabe hero, a sexpot love interest, a Nazi, a Riverdancing Bono – pouring streams of film dialogue and commentary out of his head at a phenomenal rate, spinning round the room, launching beads of sweat in all directions.
Everything is thrown at the wall in this show and, if you had the benefit of a pause and/or rewind button, remarkably most of it would stick. Unquestionably impressive to watch, the downside is that the best lines are gone, overwritten, before they’ve hit your brain. Audience members are left dumbstruck when he addresses them, like frightened schoolkids who’ve been caught not listening to teacher. The finale, a “how the…?” piece of tech wizardry has them gobsmacked. It’s flash, very flash.
There could be two hours of regular-paced material here – the segment on porn is a show in itself – and even after the main feature has finished, we get a series of out-takes. Slowing up is not an option, but taming the flow of ideas to a more manageable rate could make this phenomenal. That, or doing it all over again, so we can get the bits we missed.