I knew next to nothing about Ms. Parris when I booked the tickets - another serendipitous coming together of schedule and geography. It turns out, like most, she's been around for a while working on various comedy and improvisation projects with various groups and turning up on Radio 4 (natch) and other programmes on the BBC. She was also one of the founding members of Austentatious, a show I'd thoroughly enjoyed the previous day.
The structure of this show is that Ms. Parris has been asked to return to her old school, Loughborough Academy, to present a Keynote speech to the all-girls school. So, as she said, rather than actually write the speech she instead decided to write a Fringe show about writing the speech. She had distilled the art of inspirational speech-making into half-a-dozen key areas and with the aid of visual lists, images and audio cues proceeded to work through and cheerfully skewer each area ("Empower Yourself" and such managerial rot), pulling in anecdotes about her life to illustrate them. In addition she is a great singer and a highly skilled keyboard player and so several self-penned songs were scattered throughout the set.
It was excellent stuff. Ms. P herself is a bundle of energy and enthusiasm. Very clever and witty and extremely engaging. A little jolly hockey sticks you might think, but as she said she attended this posh school via a hard-earned bursary rather than having wealthy parents. She had solicited suggestions from the audience as we were queuing and during the show she would pick out random suggestions to see if they would make good advice for the girls. Most were, of course, silly which is the point (my own was "To avoid hangovers, don't stop drinking").
It was an excellent and thoroughly engaging show. Ms. P is certainly a talent and I shall look out for future work from her. And I got a nice little bit of audience interaction with her when she asked whether anyone had used dating websites - of course I had (Guardian Soulmates) so there was a brief interaction allowing her to observe she had been on there and reached the conclusion that most men on the site try to appear lefty and liberal but turn out to be on the right if you ever meet them; as Chaotic Good I had no idea what she meant ...
As we shuffled out I had one more show to go to but after five-in-a-row, with blisters on both feet, a sore knee and a shoulder killing me I had had enough so shambled up the George IV bridge (ironically past the Frankenstein pub) back to the flat. Barely a third of the way through and already feeling tired, sore and pissed off - nothing to do with Ms. Parris of course who was fabulous - but I began to think I had bitten off something more than I could chew ...
No comments:
Post a Comment