Following the success of their book Who Writes this Crap, Joel Stickley and Luke Wright transfer their work to the stage and promise us All the rubbish you read in a day rewritten.
The promise is fulfilled with a series of mini-lectures, underpinned by Jon Dunleavys bleak and oddly poignant stick-man animations. Leaving no area of alphabetical abuse untouched, they span the gambit of doublespeak and syntactical horrors from reverse psychology advertisement to self-publicity. We follow our stick friend through the day, narrated and explained, as he is forced to read all the asinine dross he comes across.
Stickley and Wright rarely let the pace drop with this and thankfully avoid the straight man-funny man routine. More, they keenly side-step any poetic elitism that the pair, poets themselves, may have been expected to unleash. They approach it with terrific ingenuity, deliberately confusing spam mail with Modernist poetry and comparing Tabloid magazines with Nihilist philosophers. Moments of brilliance arise when delving into the self-proclaimed crap writing of their own teenage diaries. Wrights volumes of poetry, spanning the years of 14 to 16 are gems of angsty rhetoric - such as the socio-political poem ABORT ME! (a poem about abortion). It is worth paying your money just for those 10 minutes.
Do not expect manic guffawing or punters rolling in the isles - spilling WKDs over the popped collars of their FCUKs. This is intelligent writing that plays out like a live-action version of Naoimi Kleins No-Logo filtered through the sensibilities of Chris Morris. While sharp and unrelentingly amusing, there were moments where it felt the pair pulled their punches with their anti-corporate didactics and Stickleys legal jargon spiels where somewhat overused and somewhat under-rehearsed. Ultimately though a brilliant, uplifting and very funny hour which left the audience both gleeful and cynical at anyone willing to pick up a pen.
