Some shows have “Edinburgh fringe” scored through them as if through a stick of rock. Garry Starr’s latest, Classic Penguins, is one, an absolute festival home-banker in the party-time vein of those gigs The Boy with Tape on His Face once performed at this same address. The high concept is that Starr (AKA Damien Warren-Smith), who has previous with Complete Works of Shakespeare-style acts of comedic compression, will now stage every single Penguin Classic novel in 60 minutes. That he will do so naked save for a tailcoat and a pair of orange flippers – well, that’s just a bonus.
To watch this idea work itself out for an hour, in constant playful dialogue with the audience, couldn’t be more ticklish. Warren-Smith has it neatly set up. There’s a bookshelf arrayed with the distinctive orange spines of two dozen classic Penguin novels. A live-feed video camera is trained on the space where these titles are then laid out, one after another, as punchlines to some previously inexplicable antic on stage. Garry summons an audience member to sniff a fragrance, then shoots him dead. (That’s one novel.) He tethers that same stooge to the ground with tape. (Another one.) He encourages the prisoner’s bid for freedom. (That’s a third.)
Second-guessing what these capers signify is half the fun – as Warren-Smith well knows, and enjoys short-circuiting, as per one droll routine based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For this viewer, the visual wordplay could go on for ever and I’d not tire. But sometimes the show swerves towards more raucous pleasures. There’s a grape-throwing fight. A hitherto obscure (to me) title, The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe, is put into service in the way you’d probably expect. Some of these sequences are more stag do than subtle – but usually Starr has a trick up his (nonexistent) sleeve, as with a knockabout Rudyard Kipling sketch late in the show.
In a largely speechless set, one of our host’s few utterances is the word “literature”, solemnly intoned. The pomposity is the joke: at this joyfully silly stunt-comedy floorshow, the very last thing you’ll be put in mind of is a library.
