Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella, Underbelly, Bristo Square ★★★★
From hectic Princess Di parody Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story (back at the Fringe next week) to wicked Paltrow take-down Gwyneth Goes Skiing, Awkward Productions – real-life partners Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – are Fringe regulars, and they’ve carved a distinctive niche with their high-camp, extremely silly, barbed and splenetic comedy shows.
Their offering this year, however, is something rather different. In the summer of 2024, Karp was struck with an umbrella in a homophobic attack in Soho. Martin apprehended the aggressor, and it looked like it would be an open-and-shut case headed straight for trial. Until police delays took things in a different direction altogether.
Where earlier Awkward shows have been high-energy, fast-moving affairs, Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella is focused, reflective and surprisingly calm. Karp himself is the (mostly) lone narrator, weaving together the lead-up to and aftermath of the attack itself with the history of his and Martin’s relationship, even zooming out further to observe the duo’s relationship with performance and the Fringe itself. Without divulging too many details, a landmark personal event for Karp and Martin at last year’s Fringe is even explained as a direct response to the attack.
For Karp and Martin, it’s a daring swerve away from their trademark glittering pantomimey excess to something quieter and more straightforward – perhaps, as Karp mischievously suggests, in a conscious attempt to get them taken more seriously by a certain central London theatrical establishment. That said, Karp maintains an upbeat mood with plenty of sniping remarks, and carry over the intensive audience participation from previous shows, even if they’re also clear to set their experiences within the context of growing anti-LGBT hate crimes.
Karp manages to maintain what’s a precarious balance between authentic honesty and more flamboyant performance – though, as he demonstrates, they’re effectively just two sides of the same thing. And by the show’s exuberant closing dance routine, Karp’s transformation of his attack into a piece of theatre feels itself like an act of resistance and defiance.
Whatever Happened to That Guy?, Pleasance Dome ★★★★
Cornwall-based theatre company Maybe You Like It have also carved a distinctive Fringe niche for themselves with beautifully crafted, usually madcap, often quirky comedies – last year’s slightly more serious (though no less quirky) Down to Chance, in fact, is making a return this year at the Pleasance Courtyard. New show Whatever Happened to That Guy?, however, maintains the company’s trademark offbeat humour and often preposterous but beautifully delivered dramatic style.
Struggling author Bee Leigh is about to be jettisoned by her publishers, but she hatches a cunning plan: she’ll ghostwrite the autobiography of much-loved TV legend Guy Wesley, whose mysterious disappearance a few years previously still has the entertainment world scratching its head. Except, of course, she’s never met the man, and the book willl be entirely fictitious.
There’s a central issue with writer (and Maybe You Like It co-artistic director) Caleb Barron’s amusingly convoluted storyline, which is of course how anyone ever believes the outlandish scheme is going to work. A great deal of disbelief needs to be suspended here – and it quickly is, as the three-hander farce expands into ever more bonkers territory.
Ellie Cooper, Maggie Moriarty and Robert Merriam (pictured above, image by Ali Wright) multi-task breathlessly but immaculately across the play’s cast of larger-than-life characters, and Barron’s own direction keeps the storyline crystal clear and the humour crisp and immediate, with droll running gags aplenty. It’s maybe a show that contains more chuckles than belly laughs, but there’s much to admire in its elegant craftsmanship and its loving evocations.
