Wil Hodgsons Punkanory is an erudite, anti-linear, intense social commentary that covers, amongst much else, punk, the Spice Girls, female sexuality, Eastenders, film studies, car boot sales and the homophobia (and possible latent homosexuality) of Dennis the Menace. Hodgson, with shaven pink hair, pink nails and tattoos aplenty, stares unnervingly at audience members and speaks in a West Country monotone that can suffocate the poetry of his theories. Indeed, the humour is almost incidental (and the asides sometimes rather basic), and Hodgson is probably at his most fascinating and original when on more serious ground, a sort of cultural lay preacher. He opens with a pitch-perfect deconstruction of punks superstition and dogma, positing that it is no less restrictive than organised religion. His disarmingly intellectual analysis of the Spice Girls, his social realist extrapolation of Walter the Softie (now a fashion photographer) and his encounter with a washed-up Dennis in a pub, and his tongue-in-cheek essay on Pinocchio as a Nazi propaganda film are particularly ingenious. The structure of the show, too, is complex: each stall at a car boot sale Hodgson recalls is a narrative Chinese box, intricate stories-within-stories that unfurl anecdotes, opinions and reflections of varying quality. The stuff at the end about mature porn is, in my opinion, too deliberate a left-field sexual finale, and undermines the punk-imbued restraint of what precedes it. Hodgson claims that his act is left untouched by fifty percent of comedy clubs, but his allusions to Care Bears, My Little Pony, the merits of Steps earlier work (before they became too highbrow), the decline in the British comics industry and The Pickwick Papers reveal a subversive sensitivity and lack of self-possession. Punkanory is fairly hard work dense, outspoken and couched in quite dry, breathless delivery but it is one of the more insightful shows Ive seen at this years Fringe, and one which transcends the sanctimonious connotations of the soapbox Hodgson places on stage. An enlightening, if arduous hour.
