New Art Club are certainly as good as their word, and over an hour they they recount an elaborate tale which centres around a fierce rivalry between two small, dull villages in Cambridgeshire, and the controversial renaming of their local train station. With intense faces, dance moves, and pumping disco beats, they sporadically break out into fits of physical theatre to illustrate their account.They cleverly draw the audience in, giving us each allegiances to one side of the feud, and whipping us up into a parochial frenzy with various games and challenges, at one point encouraging the two audience teams to hurl bread at each another. It's all good fun and very effective at putting the audience at the heart of the action, but the double act's off-the-cuff banter with the punters is surprisingly weak considering the highly interactive nature of the performance. There are several strands of narrative going on, and the structure gets a little too loose and confusing with the two interrupting and trying to upstage one another. While comical physical theatre is clearly their strength, it seemed odd that this was sidelined in favour of more straightforward storytelling.The show is entertaining and different, and the enthusiasm with which many audience members rushed on stage for the final village contest suggests they were doing something right, but the concept could still do with a little work.
