Writer: Joseph Hollas
Director: Jamie Saul
Attention Span is a perfect hour’s entertainment, delivering a fantastical journey through fast, funny and unpredictable sketches. The show’s writer, Joseph Hollas, has developed a strong comic voice and there is real consistency throughout the show. The five-strong cast for Brave Mirror Theatre Company prove themselves to be versatile comic actors, coming together for some excellent ensemble work.
At the heart of the show is the Narrator, nicely played as a hopeless nerd by Finn Lanchester. The running joke is that he depends wholly for his script on his Amazon Kindle, from which he solemnly announces characters’ entrances and exits. When the Kindle goes missing, he is left wordless. In fact, Amazon itself is the butt of lots of the comedy. In an extended riff about the dominance of apps, Hollas imagines what would happen come the apocalypse if to survive you must board one of Jeff Bezos’s rockets to another planet. Joe Deighton gives a lovely performance as Bezos, playing him somewhere between zombie and lifeless automaton. And, of course, we see the hapless, app-less Everyman figure denied a place on the rocket.
TikTok is another source of comedy, blamed for our limited attention span. Monitors on stage burst into life to show a series of wonderfully pointless TikTok-like videos. At some stage virtual flames start licking up the screens and there’s a virtual vs IRL joke about a fireman coming to put them out with bottled water. Danielle De Vries is the sacked boss – we see her on screen being motored away to strains of The Apprentice theme.
But at the same time, lots of visual fun comes from the deliberately low-tech props – crude cardboard representations of everything from coffee cups to jugs of water. Rival ice cream sellers in the park offer cardboard ice cream, while Tallula White becomes a figure of pathos as the seller of balloons. Deighton, who begins the scene as a sexy ice cream vendor, becomes a slavering dog destroying the balloon-seller’s whole livelihood. Daniel Golding is the perfect sneering waiter in another scene which satirises contemporary life.
A company to watch
Runs until 24 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
