Review
Get A Round: Eggs Collective
Marlborough Theater
Friday 8th May
Pink Fringe
These three girls are the demented daughters of David Hoyle. They seem to be doing funny stuff while all the time slowly making you wake up and smell the bitter stench of reality. They wriggle and jiggle in their golden sequined frocks while offering genuine hope, love and compassion then they slap you to keep you from slipping back into an advertising induced coma, press wine on you then make you watch as they empty the bile, bitterness and confusing disappointment of contemporary life into a bucket, and yes, they make it funny.
They invite us on a night out, while making us take our places in the roll call of shame and over indulgence that make up a great British drunken night out. They make the joke, we laugh, then they hold the joke, and then hold it some more until it stops being funny and we see it for what it is. An ugly, wriggling, awkward truth. It’s a hard kind of comedy, very Northern, one that makes us sit up and own our laughter and it’s a bloody great gust of fucking feminist fresh air in a festival stuffed full of middle class safe male apolitical twaddle! Thank goodness for the Eggs’ Collective, there is hope in this brave new Tory majority world!
See info on their tour here
The show is a series of sketches rolled into and over each other, with echoes and repetitive elements, just like a drunken night out, but with some deeply uncomfortable spotlights on the feelings behind what drives us, and particular the pressures on young women in Britain, although it’s relevant to us all. I’m not sure if they are this clever or I just wanted them to be that clever, but I felt the show was a kind of cover for something deeper, something more experimental and something ennobling and empowering. Deep deep down these girls are really shallow or is that what they want us to believe, it’s rare to leave a show feeling both disturbed and also elated but the trio from the Eggs collective left me feeling just that. Not only from the quality of writing and performance on stage. Slickly hidden behind seemingly chaos and cheap tricks, these women perform sleight of hand all the time, keeping our cynical, entitled eyes distracted by some seedy bauble of grief or tragedy while slipping a sharp boning knife of hope between our ribs into the space where our hearts used to be.
See the trailer here:
It’s a hard kind of comedy, one which makes us sit up and own our laughter and it’s a bloody great gust of fucking fresh air in a festival stuffed full of middle class safe non threatening twaddle! Thank goodness for the Eggs’ Collective, there is hope in this post Cameron world
Eggs Collective are Sara Cocker, Lowri Evans and Léonie Higgins
This is fresh, raw theater, using common clichés and sad tragic lives to spear us with some uncomfortable truths about our empty consumer lives, it’s not completely original, but god is it powerful and all the more so as it’s unexpected, ruthless and done with utter relentless charm and class.
There were plenty of highlights in this short punchy show; a microphone lowered slowly onto a churning drunken girl as she heaved into a bucket; her inebriated ramblings slowly coalescing into a searing rant of the appalling wretched everyday disappoints, utter brilliance like something Bill Hicks might have thought up! And then a moment when three separate stories come together on stage, one repetitive dark story of dire drunken mishaps, one sadness and dissolution and one song of love and hope and glory, slowly they wound tighter and tighter around each other until blended they became a pitch perfect Kafkaesque feminist Dreamgirls. This was a comedic cacophony of chaos and seriously good. I was impressed and my regular reader knows how hard that is.
Keep your eyes out and check them out next time you have the opportunity, one of my fringe highlights so far! You will love them and they will love you, unconditionally.
Eggs Collective are part of the Marlborough Theaters continued efforts to showcase new, original talent on their Pink Fringe, see the rest of their programming, events and up coming and to book tickets see the website here:
