Leaving the production, two men were overheard saying ‘Well that was a bit mad, wasn’t it?’ winning them the prize for understatement of the year. Mad doesn’t even begin to cover the 35-minute show which promised to be a mixture of Mark. E. Smith, Kafka and the Beat poets. Distorting the title of Milan Kundra’s novel - The Unbearable Lightness of Being - gave false hope that there would be moments of genuine angst and questioning simmering beneath the would-be existential humour.The show begins with an electro-reggae-rap hybrid as the lights dim over a make-shift set. Strings of fairy lights overlap hand-drawn illustrations pinned to a festival-like booth. So far, so DIY. Usually DIY ventures greatly appeal to me but this production feels lazy at times, as pictures don’t fit the screen properly and costumes consist of a Devo-esque all-black ensemble with differing hats.You are definitely entering the head-space of Modal Roberts which sometimes boils over into self-indulgent stage time. Once the Bob-Marley-cum-Kraftwerk noise dies down Roberts reappears wearing a flat Chinese hat an reads from a book; this brought the show to an interesting level as the voice dropped from manic shrillness to something reminiscent of Stanley Unwin’s introduction to the Small Faces or a kindly BBC veteran commencing a Mr Benn story.Settling to a lower tempo allowed the flashes of genuinely funny material a chance to gleam out from the over-arching catch words of ‘wacky’ and ‘kooky’. An electric guitar led exploration into John Peel’s favourite song (‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones) aptly caught the mood of surreal humour. Other highlights included a rant about QWERTY keyboards and the amount of fat needed to incur man-boobs, which consist of seven inches of flesh pulled taunt if you’re interested. The character of the poor vice-manager and his sinister guide were the basis of the only cohesive and recurring sketch. As they plumbed the depths of Purgatory and dead frogs the dialogue took tones of Stephen Law’s ‘The Philosophy Files’ meeting Douglas Adams for a quiet pint to hash out the finer points of the Universe.With a slicker finish and less yelling this is a show which could make use of its legitimately funny moments to concoct cabaret-style musings on the random connections between life’s little moments and the big questions. As it is, amusement becomes lost beneath the layers of faux-surrealism.
