Here's a real Fringe gem – a slapstick extravaganza that is literally barnstorming, performed as it is in a temporary wooden box built specially for the show. Our three Dutch hosts sit outside this great shed, carving out individual flyers from pieces of wood to give to the queuing audience as keepsakes. They then lead us inside their little wooden lair to find... an empty wooden box. Which is then plunged into darkness, and the laughs begin immediately.
This is abstracted, wordless comedy. There is no story, no context, no characters beyond what we can glean from the faces of the three clowns. They stare out into the audience with their impressively rubbery visages, stuck in a peculiarly Dutch kind of awkwardness: they are seemingly all slightly too tall for their own bodies, self-conscious clowns trying to perform but not quite sure how or why. They have no particular aims in life, simply inhabiting this space they have made for themselves. They interact with themselves, with each other and with the space in an increasingly ingenious way – the deceptively simple wooden cube is in fact a magic box of surprises, the fourth performer of the troupe.
And it is funny. Oh my how it is funny. I spent most of the show with no idea quite why I was laughing, which is the mark of good clowning: they are capable of making the simplest, most unadorned action into something that threatens to rupture your diaphragm. One gag involves the simple use of a shadow for a pay-off that has the audience give that certain unique sound – a mix of shock, awe, delight and hilarity – that reminds us why we came to the Fringe. There is another involving a falling rope that simply shouldn't be as funny as it is. It might be the extremely physical feeling of the whole thing – the show is full of the very solid and near sound of wood hitting wood and the performers really hurl themselves around with breakneck force. There is the thrilling sense of danger, eye-wateringly mined in a really quite unnerving moment of crotch-based ‘injury’.
The ingenuity on display is enough to make you squeal with delight, with quite literally multi-layered toilet humour finding a whole new terror in the concept of communal toilets. The practice of giving runners water bottles is improved upon, then taken to its logically extreme conclusion in a sketch that could only exist in the most bizarre of comedy worlds. This is ur-comedy, comedy at its most basic, essential level, so perfect that children, non-English speakers and jaded critics alike can take nothing but pure joy from it. Yes, the characters may do nothing, but as the title says, nothing can be really difficult and in this case, really, really funny.
