Writer and Performer: Jo Kelen
“What if a fridge were sentient?” is a question that, frankly, nobody needs answering. But that doesn’t stop it from being the starting point for Jo Kelen’s offbeat observations and zany poetry.
Helen plays the fridge in question, dressed in a crude sandwich board with the word “SMEG” written across the front. Her fridge persona admits to occasionally humming to itself for no apparent reason, to working hard to be cool (although it concedes that the freezer is cooler). Later, its cardboard door opens to reveal pictures of various foodstuffs, each of which prompts a new section of Kelen’s set.
While the order in which the pictures are extracted is selected by the audience, each section is pre-planned. A picture of celery and rhubarb together prompts the observation that the latter is just the former with a personality: Kelen then imagines what life would be like if a freewheeling rhubarb child was raised by celery parents, or vice versa (rhubarb adults apparently living in some sort of polycule).
The tenses in that story somewhat jarringly switch from present to past, which suggests that maybe there is some work to be done to refine the presentation. Elsewhere, a love of Edward Lear-style rhyme is evident in the updating of The Owl and the Pussycat, with the couple some twenty years on from their original wedding. A similar sense of jocular silliness pervades the other pieces: from a tale of a cow wooing (and mooing) with a bull who’s definitely inappropriate for her, to a tale of a teddy bear fighting a spider.
It’s all rather childlike rather than childish, a little rough and unpolished while also engaging. Some of Kelen’s pieces do have a tendency to tail off without great conclusion, though, and the random nature of the pieces’ ordering means that there’s no opportunity to give a greater sense of structure to the 45-minute show.
The audience is asked to join in some call-and-response style participation in a couple of Kelen’s poems, but such moments rarely go anywhere. It all adds up to a show that is sweet but somewhat lacking: certainly not as cool as a Smeg fridge, but maybe just as cool as a cardboard one.
Continues until 11 March 2023
