Mythellaneous

This charming play, devised by New York’s Messenger Theatre Company, is a classic tale of courage, masculinity and valour, but there’s one difference: the hero is late.

A reluctant participant, wearing a red nose and a tutu, is plucked from the audience and told her seat is upon the stage. She looks embarrassedly at the rest of us and twiddles her thumbs, waiting for the show to start. She goes through the elaborate motions of switching off her phone, and when still nothing happens, she begins to amuse herself with the rag doll that resides in her rucksack. Then another phone rings onstage and it is destiny calling; this childlike clown has been summoned and must now embark upon the “Hero’s Journey.”

Incorporating a mixture of mime, puppetry and musical theatre, Emily Davis brings both sensitivity and joy to her role as the clown. An omniscient voice-over narrates her formulaic passage through the necessary stages of heroism in a quaintly amusing and utterly endearing way. A Johnny Bravo-esque super smooth and utterly useless Hollywood hero, played by Jerry Richardson, joins her briefly onstage, but try as he might, he cannot steal Davis’s limelight.

Throwing in all the miscellaneous aspects of theatre and commenting ironically on its own narrative conformity, ‘Mythellaneous’ offers something a little different to the things you’ll see elsewhere. With lots of self-referential moments and the actors’ ability to laugh at themselves, this is a refreshing take on what we’re all doing here at the Fringe.