Tom Flanagan has a great concept in his Fringe World show Kaput, a silent movie era-inspired circus show featuring significant amounts of audience participation, but sometimes the execution falters. When things didn’t go quite to plan towards the end of the show, on the night this reviewer attended, Flanagan’s excellent improvisational skills gave way to frustrated grimaces.
The notion of involving your audience in improvisational routines is inherently risky – what if they don’t do what you want them to? Of course, given that Kaput is entirely mimed, there were plenty of opportunities for comedic misinterpretations. But Flanagan’s desire to introduce some (non-verbal) sexual references somehow marred his core idea of pure old fashioned slapstick fun – as did his ‘over the head’ hand gesture when we didn’t seem to react enough to his jokes.
The idea of physical risk in a show like this is a strong one – we have too much focus on being safe in all aspects of our lives today – but the audience needs to be a bit more warmed up to the idea, rather than being thrown into it head first, as it’s one we are perhaps no longer used to.
Conversely, the intimate venue of this distinctly Fringe show allows the audience to be close up to Flanagan and gain a strong sense of the danger his act creates. His backward walking ladder skills are a sight that I will long remember – a fantastic circus trick done with great courage.
Fringe World shows (some tents more than this one) are enduring the extreme heat in Perth at the moment, but this show still had a reasonable audience, including a man with a very loud laugh, so Flanagan had no need to urge his audience on if they didn’t completely ‘get it’. This modern style of the self-aware performer deconstructing his own performance as he goes disengages the viewer – certainly it took this critic out of the zone established by Flanagan and his old fashioned costume of boater, bow tie and suspenders.
The squeezebox soundtrack and old fashioned honky piano, and especially the big chord signifying ‘grand passion’, were all cleverly utilised. I particularly loved the use of kazoo whistling, chalkboard and sign language to tell a story – a DIY writ-in-poetry approach!
The winner of the Spirit of the Fringe Award at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe, Kaput is funny and sweet, and features some clever acrobatics. It’s a good opportunity for families to go out together and enjoy some circus joy at the Fringe.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
Kaput
Presented by Strut and Fret Production House and Tom Flanagan
Created and performed by Tom Flanagan.
Circus Theatre, Perth Cultural Centre
11 – 24 February
Fringe World 2013
www.fringeworld.com.au
25 January – 24 February
