This comedy show is about the Israel-Palestine conflict and lasts for two hours. Two hours. It’s very long, it involves a high level of concentration, it’s peppered with statistics about the conflict and it’s delivered at breakneck speed. It’s also one of the funniest, wisest, saddest and most engaging shows I’ve seen in a long time.‘Extreme Rambling’ is the story of Thomas and his cameraman Phil as they attempt to walk the length of the wall (or fence, depending on your sympathies) surrounding the West Bank and his anecdotes about the people and scenes he lists along the way in both Israeli settlements and Palestinian small towns. No matter how many statistics he lists, how furious he sounds, or how he will build his routines into the wider picture of the conflict, he never loses sight of the humanity of the situation – grounding it in the characters he sees with both hilarious and tragic results. An anecdote about a Palestinian zookeeper and his attempts to perform amateur taxidermy on a giraffe killed in a tear gas attack perfectly sums up the comedy he finds in his bizarre surroundings and the pathos surrounding them.Mark and Phil are naïve travellers from South London, cast adrift in a strange land. Thomas’ incredible capacity for breathlessly painting pictures of their travels turns a complex conflict into a human drama, with belly laughs and moments of real sadness. It is his commitment to describing all they see on their journey that makes the show so rich. He tells us all he saw, from the similarity between Orthodox Jewish dress and outfits worn by the Blues Brothers, to describing the plight of Palestinian workers crammed against a checkpoint at 6am, waiting for their chance to go over the border to their jobs. In these sadder moments Thomas slows down the pace a huge degree, leaving gigantic pauses between sentences at odds with the 100mph delivery of the majority of the show. The effect is devastating.The experience is tiring and staggering out of the Bongo Club back into the rain feels like emerging from a journey of the audience’s own. At no point does it feel like a lecture, and at no point does Thomas’ keen eye for character comedy jar with the gravity of the scenarios he describes. There is no greater evidence for the idea that travel broadens the mind than this show.
