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Edinburgh Fringe: The Boy With Tape on His Face/ Barbershopera/ Tom Allen | reviews, news & interviews

Edinburgh Fringe: The Boy With Tape on His Face/ Barbershopera/ Tom Allen

Edinburgh Fringe: The Boy With Tape on His Face/ Barbershopera/ Tom Allen

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This is a show of such originality and inventiveness that I will struggle to convey just how much fun it is to watch a man perform sight gags and physical comedy for an hour - and who does indeed appear throughout with a strip of black gaffer tape over his mouth.

The Boy with Tape on His Face, Gilded Balloon ****

Although New Zealander Sam Wills doesn’t speak a word and uses clowning skills in his act, this is far removed from the kind of knockabout humour that is usually accompanied by a hooter to mark the punchline. Instead he has an incredibly expressive face to convey his thoughts, whether irritation or pleasure, or a request, and takes silent comedy to a new level.

The sight gags get ever more clever as the hour progresses and part of the fun is trying to work out where a joke is going, as Wills fashions something out of a box of props (a hat, some duct tape, a chopping board) or some music blasts out and we see him convey the singer - Michael Jackson, for example, appears just as a pair of dancing shoes. There’s the occasional dud joke - a waste bin that lights up and plays music when opened, for instance, I have seen done many times before - but overall one is left gasping by WIlls’s sideways route into a joke. My favourite is the one where that scene from the film Ghost is recreated with a stool, a ball of Plasticine and a woman from the audience; the reveal is timed to perfection.

This is a show heavy on audience participation, but Wills, who uses only gentle gestures and an extremely expressive pair of eyes to indicate what he wants from his “volunteers”, never humiliates and - joy to behold - his silence means that audience members who get up on stage fall silent, too. I didn’t want the hour to end. Until 29 August

Barbershopera, Pleasance Dome ****

God is pretty unimpressed with the way humans have looked after Earth - “That’s the blue and green one, isn’t it?” - and summons the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to destroy us all. So starts Apocalypse No!, a musical performed a cappella in close harmonies, the third Fringe production by a talented troupe of writers and performers not long out of university.

The cast of four - Rob Castell, Tom Sadler, Pete Sorel-Cameron and Lara Stubbs - play the Horsemen and the rather grumpy archangels guarding Heaven’s gates. Stubbs also plays nice teacher Beth who, due to St Anne’s leisure centre being confused for Satan’s lair (think about it), has to stand in for the always late Death as the four ride off on their hobby-horses to do away with humans. But they’re a sappy lot and can’t do the dastardly deed, because what they really want is to get to Heaven to meet their hero, Richard Whiteley, host until his death of that perennial student favourite, Countdown. All sorts of lovely nonsense involving schoolboy puppets, some dreadful puns and a very good gag about hand driers is played out as the four make rapid changes between the nice Horsemen and the nasty archangels, and things are eventually resolved. Sarah Tipple directs things apace.

Apocalypse No! - a bright idea, engagingly written and performed by a bunch of young talents - is the quintessential Fringe show. Until 30 August

Tom Allen, Gilded Balloon ***

The slightly built and velvety voiced comic - whom you will know from Channel 4’s Big Brother’s Big Mouth and the excellent Bleak Expectations on Radio 4 - has entitled this show Tom Allen Toughens Up! and appears on his poster with a rather menacing-looking dog. He tells us it’s because he has had a crisis of confidence and wants to be emotionally stronger, and what follows is a series of stories that paint a vivid picture of his life as he tries to do just that. The tales, most of them tall, involve a fight at a family funeral, what to write on birthday cards passed around the office, and conversations with his mother, hilariously represented as a gravel-voiced bruiser.

This is an amusing hour spent in the company of a wonderfully sardonic anecdotalist who has a lovely way with words and a warm presentational style, but the show feels like a construct - and that the real Tom Allen lies somewhere beyond his material. Until 29 August

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