There's a challenge at the heart of the New Rope String Band's late-afternoon show where our three heroes perform a previously little-known morris dance and order the audience not to laugh because it's rude to make fun of other people's culture.
Reader, I failed. Even the most avid morris dance advocate would, I suspect, fail too.
As the folk scene has known for some time, these guys are nuts. In the nicest possible way. From morris dancing to break dancing, via the Bee Gees, and from world music – in the guise of a Malaysian song, allegedly – to Mars (the Holst one, played on a theremin), they get around their many cultural references with prodigious musicianship laced with their very own brand of slapstick, mirthful mock self-reverence, pints both of dodgy provenance and an explosive nature, and much sheer badness towards their hapless, kilted accordionist.
In a show that clocks up way more than a laugh a minute, the highlights include a game of ping-pong between the two fiddlers and a film show that purports to be live and interactive but like almost everything else the trio performs, from Appalachian waltz to "a tune on the pipes", has a thoroughly entertaining alternative outcome. Until August 12.
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An hour of beatboxing could easily be 50 minutes too long but Tom Thum's Beating the Habit mostly holds the attention for the duration and is helped in true Blue Peter fashion by one he made earlier. The one here being a documentary that sees Thum entering beatboxing rehab and attending Beatboxers Anonymous in a bid to stop spitting out his breakfast through hi hat and snare impressions and punctuating every sentence with scratch DJ noises and hand gestures.
Thum's a musician at heart –- his musical references span Fauré's Pavane to Michael Jackson to Louis Armstrong – and while his demonstration of how his art and its supporting technology work and an audience participation sequence don't add much to the show, he has an deniable talent for rhythm and instrumental mimicry.
Until August 27.
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The flyer for Temper Temper's The Pain of Desire reads like a Hollywood starlet's acceptance speech at the Oscars but the show itself is much starker and to the point. As the voice for songs that take the theatrical wiles of Brecht and Weill into the realm of piano pummelling, drum-thumping brutalism, occasional violinist Wendy Bevan does a fine job, combining a kind of gothic Lady Bracknell hauteur (she never actually says "a handbag" but the phrase keeps springing to mind) with the terminally disappointed in love's air of resigned melancholy. It's a song cycle of some promise, with intriguing visuals and interesting electro-acoustic interludes, although the advertised jazz and blues elements are rather craftily camouflaged.
Until August 18.
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