Latest from Noises Off
I don’t care much for fossils. Kevin Coprolite, a short and astute individual, looks passionately unimpressed at this. He’s standing with a clipboard outside the Club de Pompidou, which inside lives up to its fanciful glam-trash name.
The cast talk to themselves as much as they talk to you. The environment is real. They are real. We are all part of something. A club night. A theatre performance. A murder investigation.
Boys are girls and girls are boys, and beards are fashioned by Crayola felt-tips. Hair is wild and colourful. Costumes are wilder. This world is as real as a dream, which is as real as we feel it is.
Relationships are fraught yet fun. We walk across the tension between them not like a tightrope, but a gapingly wide road that leads to some awkwardly amusing rebuttals.
The desire for resolving the crime seems more rooted in the trivial pursuit of settling one’s curiosity than for an emotional striving for justice, but the bouncer is called Studley and he has hair like Sonic the Hedgehog, so it doesn’t really matter, I suppose.
The music is good. Brilliantly bad in fact, as it usually is at club nights. In my exceptionally investigative mood, I sussed out the instrumental tracks serving as the soundtrack to our travels to be derived from classic noughties pop. I’m so clever. I bet no one else figured that out. I’m the elite scholar of Now That’s What I Call Music 57 to 71, and there’s absolutely nothing any of you can do about it.
People do a lot of investigating though. They talk to people. They look at things. They look in things. Sometimes they find things. Someone found a card that was taped to the arse of The Great Alonzo. Someone else found a pebble.
We talked about who we think did it. We all had different choices and different reasons for our choices. So did the suspects. In the words of Stuart Lee: “Time passed...and something happened. Some music came on at the end. It’s finished now. But they can’t say that nothing happened because they can see it did.”
