[FRINGE] some boxes are best left unopened

[reverancepavane]

In the middle of the Garden of Unearthly Delights there is a large wooden box. This is the Fringe home of Theatergroep WAK, who are presenting Niets is echt moeilijk (Nothing is really difficult). The audience is brought into the box and seated in a gallery, and the lights brought down. It's pretty dark inside the box, and it soon turns out the reason why these Dutch performers needed a specially built performance venue. The show itself is basically a silent physical comedy. Not quite acrobatics (although there is some of that involved in their antics), and not quite slapstick (again, they do invoke some minor slapstick, but nothing which the past masters of the art would consider to be so), the actors get around the language barrier by not using any (although there was at least two occasions where the body language used differed between Australia and Northern Europe enough to be lost on most of the audience. But generally it was pretty evocative. Tending slightly toward the surrealistic (it is, after all, being performed in a large wooden box), there were essentially a number of connected vignettes. The ones that involved the properties of the box (which I won't spoil for you), were the best, closely followed by a "fast food" skit and the closing driving skit. On the other hand the "kicking each other in the 'nads" and (sadly, quite literal) "toilet humour" vignettes definitely detracted from the show, adding a touch of rather puerile humour. Whilst quite professionally performed, I would have liked to have seen more of the box being used as an integral part of the show, beyond the early part of the show. The middle part was a touch prolonged, and may have lost some of the audience who were waiting for something to happen, and I found it unsatisfying as it descended into 'nad kicking and toilet humour. Although it did pick up again with the "fast food" sketch, which allowed them to rather cleverly build the set for the final driving sketch. So all in all a rather polished show, just not something I'd really recommend. It is however, one of the few shows that is on three times a night. Probably 3 stars, just on the grounds of the sheer professionalism and inventiveness of the box. Pity it actually wasn't used to a greater degree though. The actual humour was about 2 star though.