REVIEW: Dramatic Moose in The Universe PLC - Mission Theatre

Is this really Dramatic Moose’s first Fringe production? You’d not think so…

It starts unpromisingly, I’d have to say. Two blokes at a table talking. This has dramatic import - we’re talking about boring and mundane lives, and this at least shows us that - plus it’s good not to believe that one of the characters is who he says he is, so the suspicion that he is somewhat cracked needs to be reinforced. Perhaps a more experienced company could have contrived to do this differently, but both goals are scored, so I can’t really complain, and nobody said you have to be comfortable or even entertained throughout. Anyway the job is to engage with the conversation, however banal in places - the Everyman character, wittily named Guy, really is that banal.

Before the interval, there are 2 big reveals: the one you’d have expected if you read the programme blurb, and a supplementary one which made me smile. Interval, you say? On a 90 minute show? I wondered for a moment, but it’s a good decision: the second half is more dynamic, stronger. more interesting, though we’ve still got the same two blokes in the same room. The interval aids digestion.

The second half accelerates away from the ho-hum philosophical conversation we would have predicted into a rollercoaster of reality shifts, and manages to engage us with the characters, both of them, and their predicaments, while scattering ‘cosmicomics’ and perspective games of the sort beloved of a Douglas Adams or an Italo Calvino, and if neither as funny or as profound as those two masters, that would be a major achievement for a new team: it’s not for the want of trying, nor the effectiveness of the points scored. For example, I enjoyed the implications of God/humankind “in his own image”, and I loved it that God really wanted to be an actor.

The roles have been convincingly created, and by the end they have moved well beyond the boredom into emotional engagement, and who’s to say the difficulties in doing that aren’t part of the construction too. Certainly worth 90 minutes of your time, and running this evening [Friday 29th] at The Mission Theatre.

Dr Zeno