Garry Starr: Classic Penguins — Arts Theatre
★★★★½ (4.5/5)
Let's get the obvious question out of the way first: yes, he's naked for almost the entire show. But if you walk into Classic Penguins expecting ninety minutes of shock value dressed up as theatre, you've badly underestimated what Garry Starr is actually doing here — and that miscalculation is precisely why this show works as brilliantly as it does.
The setup is a joke in itself: a man in a tailcoat, an Elizabethan ruff, and a pair of fluorescent orange flippers — and, as it turns out, nothing else — has appointed himself the saviour of Western literature. His mission: perform the entire Penguin Classics catalogue in a single hour. What follows isn't so much a show as a controlled explosion, a 70-minute sprint through Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Breakfast at Tiffany's and a dozen other titles, each dispatched in the time it takes most stand-ups to set up a single joke.
What's easy to miss, amid the flying grapes and the crowd-surfing and the frankly heroic commitment to a Moon River bit that has no business being as funny as it is, is just how disciplined this chaos actually is. Director Cal McCrystal — the man responsible for making James Corden's physical comedy sing in One Man, Two Guvnors, and for the slapstick choreography in both Paddington films — knows exactly how to build an audience's trust before he lets Starr detonate it. There's a reason the crowd-surfing sequence lands: by the time it happens, Starr (in reality Damien Warren-Smith, a Gaulier-trained clown who cut his teeth with the troupe A Plague of Idiots) has spent twenty minutes proving he's not interested in humiliating anyone, least of all himself. The nudity stops being the joke almost immediately and becomes something closer to an offering — total, ridiculous vulnerability as a kind of trust exercise with the room.
That's the thing critics who call this show "shallow" are missing, I think. Classic Penguins was never trying to teach you literature — that's the joke, not the failure. What it's actually interested in is something closer to what great clowning has always been about: using absurdity to strip away the audience's guardedness until they're genuinely, helplessly present in the room with the performer. Judged as literary criticism, sure, it's a belly-slide across the surface. Judged as an hour of pure, unguarded connection between a performer and several hundred strangers, it's close to a masterclass.
Is it perfect? No — and this is where the half star goes. The back third of the show occasionally runs on momentum rather than invention; a few of the later titles get the same beat repeated with a different book cover, and you can feel the show reaching for its next big swing rather than fully earning it. A slightly tighter edit in that stretch would take this from very good to unimpeachable.
But that's a minor complaint against a show with this much heart, craft and sheer audacity. Starr has built something genuinely rare: a piece of theatre that's filthy and clever in equal measure, performed by someone who has clearly thought harder about the mechanics of a laugh than most "serious" playwrights think about a plot point. I left the Arts Theatre grinning, slightly stunned, and quietly moved by how much warmth was hiding inside all that nonsense.
Verdict: A masterclass in vulnerability disguised as a naked man reading Moby Dick — filthy, fearless, and impossible not to fall for.
Post a Comment