Moments of surreal humour and philosophical insight make this an enjoyable performance, but its slap-dash production and lack of cohesion give it only superficial charm. Fans of Shooting Stars-esque absurdity would have been licking their lips when the show opened with “horse” Adam Ekin throwing plastic cups into the audience to “build some tension”, but as the show progressed the promise of absurd hilarity remained precisely that. The 2 characters, a writerly king and an equally literary horse, wait on their travelling sofa for an appropriate time to complete their journey to the mystical and abstracted Karawane, entertaining themselves through sketches in a kind of meta-narrative. The actors themselves admitted pre-performance that the show was “a little rough”, but the characters created were, in their own unique way, very charming; one sketch involving two cockneys in an existential crisis was particularly enjoyable, containing wit and insight in equal measures. Equally, the play-within-a-play concept applied to comedy raised interesting artistic questions about the reliability of theatre language.
Despite this, however, the play left the audience feeling unsatisfied: the plethora of literary references scarcely managed to save the often incomprehensible rants and rambles that acted as a bridge between sketches, and the nod to Beckett’s Waiting For Godot felt particularly resonant, for the audience at least. There were moments of both real poignancy and hilarity, and there was a definite sense that with more focused scripting and cohesion, it could have been a real hit.
