The Martlet

Solo performance, the raison d’être of Intrepid Theatre’s annual UNO Fest, inspires within me respect, admiration and a good dose of skepticism. A performer must have extraordinary talent to hold an audience’s attention for 45 to 90 minutes, creating comedy and drama out of nothing more than their own words and actions on stage.

To do it well takes knowledge of tension, conflict, comedy and dramaturgy. However, when done poorly, the audience is left indulging an actor with an over-inflated sense of dramatic entitlement. With no one else on stage to focus on, the polite theatre-goer can only count down the minutes.

That being said, the performances I caught at this year’s UNO Fest, which ran from May 20 to 30, had few boring moments. Uncomfortable moments, definitely, thanks to Eric Davis’s “Red Bastard,” but also incredibly theatrical ones, such as those offered by Matthew Payne’s “Cariboo Buckaroo.”

Chris Gibbs’s “Like Father Like Son? Sorry” was UNO Fest at its most essential: one person on stage telling stories to an audience.

Gibbs is a comedian by trade, so his show is not one long story but a series of small ones grouped around a common theme. He lead us through the quirks of being a new father like a tour guide at Euro Disney — a couple of bizarre and charming main attractions, but with a lot of time between them filled with self-deprecating anecdotes and ironic acrobatics. Gibbs is hilarious when his material is focused, but as this was a premiere performance, the show meandered a bit and the performance was tentative for the first half. With some cuts and more shows under his feet, Gibbs will have a real winner.

“Redheaded Stepchild,” written and performed by Johnny Walker, was a completely different experience. We were shown the cruelty of the phrase “beaten like a redheaded stepchild” through a variety of characters, action figures and old Rita Hayworth songs on a stage dominated by a giant toy chest and miles of red string. Walker brings us into the poor kid’s world through his sneering ginger protagonist, his smoking stepmother and a very queer, silk robe-wearing alter-ego. While the pace could be tightened and the “pity the ginger” message could be subtler near the end, there were true moments of honesty and investigation: Walker succeeds in holding up a ruby jewel to the light and examining it from all angles, for its features and flaws.

Theatre SKAM’s “Cariboo Buckaroo” was hands down my favourite of the festival. Payne is a natural performer and theatrical wizard, and his two-act tale of an 1800s cattle drive up to the Cariboo region of B.C. leaves the audience lowing in the aisles. Between songs, game shows, treasure hunts for the children in the audience (to get them out of the house for the grisly, cannibalistic limericks), a simple cattle trail turns into a lively, and even moving, tour of our province’s early history. Whether it’s turning a tinfoil-covered circle from sun to moon, riding a wooden sawhorse, or stalling a toy train, each digression found on Payne’s trail leaves us wondering what other stories are out there in the British Territories.

Yet it was the Davis’s “Red Bastard” which was both the least enjoyable performance to sit through and the most memorable afterwards. A clown trained at the prestigious Jacques LeCoq school in Paris, Davis dresses up as a bulbous tumor and heckles the audience for an hour and a half. Literally. He takes the social contract of the theatre — audience sits and watches, performer performs — and stretches it to its extreme. “Yes, it’s that kind of show,” the Bastard cackles as the house lights come up at the beginning, looking for easy marks sitting in the Metro’s red velvet chairs. At one point, while getting a shy girl to yell into his mouth, he rubbed his growths over my head and rubbed my shoulders like a trainee masseuse.

Despite telling no story and despite the verbal and physical attacks, Davis dares the audience to reach for their dreams. By building a relationship with the spectators where they are not afraid of talking back, the serious questions asked by the deflated tumor halfway through can receive honest answers. His confrontational performance, daring us to do the things we dream of and then mocking us when we cry out that we will, lingered on in my mind far longer than any other post-festival.

Even if I gritted my teeth through his performance, Davis has created a lingering and affecting work of art that challenges us to become the antithesis of his character – better human beings.