Image: www.fringeworld.com.au
Perth Fringeworld is a gamble. The quality of the festival has been climbing over the past several years, however, and with experience and the right recommendations, a punter can often go the whole month without seeing something too terrible. Usually, though, there’s at least one. At these times, it becomes a matter of suffering through those 60 minutes of awfulness while trying to remain grateful for the many fantastic shows that Fringe summons to our isolated little hometown. Resident Musician by Will Pickvance is one show that certainly puts an audience’s powers of gratitude to the test.
Last year and this year, the British Pianist brought a show called Anatomy of a Piano to Fringe that gained him a small murmur of acclaim. In that show, he delivers a musical lecture of sorts, dissecting the instrument and telling corresponding stories and histories. Pickvance is a magnificent pianist, the sort who can’t remember not playing, and whose very posture, gesture and temperament have been shaped around dedication to the instrument. From the reviews, it seems that this passion and knowledge are channeled in Anatomy, which has made it into a very passable show.
Resident Musician has no such merciful intrigue – or any worthwhile point to it at all. In it, Pickvance is stuck as the resident pianist at the Inver Castle, a lofty, reclusive getaway for rich “V-V-VIPs”. It’s Groundhog Day there, and has been for 1,829 days by the time we meet him. The show starts on a Saturday night, and over the next 60-minutes Pickvance runs us through a week of the mundane Inver Castle routine, singing a handful of forgettable songs, and having idle conversations with rich clients, who appear as poorly animated, black and white sketches on a screen. There’s a tacked on plot line where one of the rich folk has promised to hook Pickvance up with Harry Connick Jr and make him a star. This conversation takes place entirely over SMS, and the rich man’s incessant messages, one for each sentence of text, regularly set off Pickvance’s irritating message tone.
Apparently Dylan Moran said something nice about Pickvance once, though I struggled to find the source – just the quote written on every piece of publicity the pianist has ever mustered. The copy for this show is equally misleading. The promised ‘unpredictable adventures of celebrities, eccentrics and castles’ are completely obvious and about as adventurous as a night on the sofa with the cat. The show is also resplendent with bad singing, some lackluster audience participation and a story that has no real reason for existing.
Will Pickvance may have done well with Anatomy of a Piano, and his playing skills are truly something to behold, but Resident Musician is a very long hour of boredom and regret. The show doesn’t just discuss mundane existence, it demonstrates.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
Flash in the Can presents
Resident Musician
Written and performed by Will Pickvance
20-22 Feb
Da Parel Spiegeltent
