FestBuzz

What: Bal­lad of the Skull Fairy by The Stealth Fan­tas­tic
Where: Under­belly
When: 6 — 15 August
How Much: £6 — £10

In 140 char­ac­ters or less: “A rol­lick­ing phan­tas­mago­ria of mur­der, betrayal, good, evil, skulls, giant squids, arm-flailing, and obscene poems from the West Country!”

Part of the magic of the Fringe is the dizzy­ingly hap­haz­ard lay­out of the per­for­mances: the­atre for break­fast, per­haps, with a quick dose of com­edy to perk you up after work and maybe a musi­cal as the cen­tre­piece of an evening. Then there are the late-night per­for­mances, the type you some­times stum­ble into after one drink too many, and which seem like a bril­liant idea at the time. I sus­pect this was the case for more than a few mem­bers of the audi­ence at the Bal­lad of the Skull Fairy, though the addi­tion of a bit of alco­hol would no doubt help this mish­mash of silly com­edy go down a lit­tle better.

The show (for the per­form­ers them­selves openly admit that Bal­lad is not a play and was in fact mis­la­belled in the Fringe cat­a­logue as the­atre) loosely fol­lows the quest of the impres­sion­able Marc (Marc Vestey) to pro­cure a skull for his evil lord, the Skull Fairy (Will Sea­ward) in order to become a skull prince. What Marc doesn’t know is that the Skull Fairy actu­ally intends to hit him over the head with the skull, and then kill the king of China in the same man­ner and begin his dom­i­na­tion of the world. Or some­thing like that. To be hon­est, the plot hardly mat­ters, as it is so vague and inci­den­tal to the bursts of sur­real phys­i­cal com­edy and witty word­play that are intended to be the main attrac­tion. How­ever, the end result is a per­for­mance that drifts some­where between the­atre and stand-up with­out ever cap­tur­ing the best ele­ments of either.

It’s a pity, as writer/director/performer Sea­ward and his side­kick Vestey pos­sess character-acting tal­ent and humour to spare. Sea­ward is the cre­ator of the hugely pop­u­lar “Bouncy Cas­tle Exper­i­ment”, in which ver­sions of Ham­let, Mac­beth and Drac­ula were pre­car­i­ously staged on bouncy cas­tles at fes­ti­vals past. Over the last few years these irrev­er­ent offer­ings became high­lights of the Fringe. Unfor­tu­nately, Bal­lad of the Skull Fairy seems unlikely to fol­low this trend. While the per­for­mance is very funny, in a mad, slap­stick, some­times utterly ran­dom man­ner, and does con­tain the ele­ments adver­tised on the tin (skulls, tib­ias, gra­tu­itous giant squids, arm-flailing and obscene poems), the viewer is ulti­mately left won­der­ing what is the point of it all.

The show is akin to watch­ing a pair of very clever drama school stu­dents goof­ing off in the high school cafe­te­ria – enter­tain­ing and amus­ing, but aside from the odd one-liner, hardly mem­o­rable. The audi­ence gig­gled and guf­fawed aplenty, but I sus­pect many even­tu­ally grew a bit weary of the out­right silli­ness of it all. If the show had been struc­tured and pre­sented as stand-up or even comedic sketches, or else pinned more securely to a well-crafted plot, Sea­ward and Vestey’s abil­i­ties would have found a bet­ter show­case. As it stands, how­ever, Bal­lad of the Skull Fairy is best left as a late-night bit of fun to fin­ish off an evening’s mer­ri­ment, with­out too many expectations.

Fes­t­buzz Rating:

Words: Domenica Goduto