Skip to main content

Max and Ivan Are... Con Artists

FAVOURITES          PLAY         
   
     'Crying with laughter' doesn't quite cover it. If I smoked, I would have needed a cigarette, but instead settled for a walk, a twix and bashing out a review. Like the second album, the second Fringe show is a difficult thing to pull off, but somehow from Holmes and Watson last year to the crack team of Con Artists they portray this year, Max and Ivan have kept the standard breathtakingly high with a show so impeccable it's difficult to know exactly where to start.
     Having developed a talent for moulding their two faces into a crowd of characters, Max and Ivan fly full-throttle into their double-act, with not two but eight main characters, each distinguished by accent, pose, expression and relationship to one another, so that a six-way hotel phonecall is pulled off astonishingly well with a certain sweaty concentration. Even this early in the run the show is flawless, snapping forwards and backwards through time with the smoothest tech-work this side of the Royal Mile. It's a shame the venue is small, but a pleasure to be in such an intimate space witht he two tireless comedians, especially when a lothario Argentinian picks on whoever happens to be in his eye-line in the front row.
     It's not good comedy etiquette to reveal the details of a show, so all I can do is encourage you to hunt down a ticket however you can. And bring some tissues.

EDIT: That six-way phonecall scene? Where the pair jump up and down into and out of different characters with only a couple of chairs to support them?
           One chair broke. Still brilliant.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Calgary, Alberta

Yesterday I ran around the city a bit, trying to see as much as possible for as little as possible...      It was hard.      The walk from Sean's place in Renfrew was long but scenic. Cold and crisp, Calgary did turn out to be mostly suburb, with a pretty concentrated centre with all your usual tourist hangouts just south of the Bow river where a lot of money can be spent very easily. Like $14 for going up Calgary Tower, $9 for a student ticket to the Glenbow Museum, and all those malls! They're all interconnected, so you could probably walk from shop to shop most of the way across the city without having to see sunlight. This is probably the idea behind the Plus Fifteen, too- a heated walkway above the streets so the Calgarians don't have to freeze in winter.      The Glenbow offered your normal mix of traditional art, weird modern stuff, rooms full of the extensive and glorious history of Alberta, all 150 years of it,...

You Say It Best...

(originally published by The Student )      Watch any western, any black-and-white adventure film, any rags-to-riches adaptation, and you'll realise we've seen this all before. The guy gets the girl, the evil tyrant falls and the True King rises, be it Middle Earth or the Mid-West. We've seen these scenes repeated across time and space, and we know how it goes. Without the speech, the scene still goes the same way. New film The Artist proves this, without saying a word. Aside from the picture-perfect cast and a dog which will reach cult celebrity status any day now, the film addresses the transition between '20s movies and '30s talkies, and a sparse use of sound which offers a challenge to the film-makers.      In one scene, uncharacteristically static, a pair of old friends meet and greet, swap stories, laugh- the details, irrelevant, are replaced by an emotive score and some close camera-work, all of which makes us feel no less connected to the...

Edinburgh Exchanges

     I've also just jumped aboard the Edinburgh Exchanges blog, which contains snippets from students around the world on International or Erasmus exchanges. I do so hoping with all my heart that this will not entail any deadlines. http://edinburghexchanges.wordpress.com/author/jajderian/