February 1, 2012
The Curse of the Oxford Revue is the story of a small town, Blight-upon-Cripple, and a journalist, assigned to write about the town’s celebrity vole, who discovers a mystery: the town is cursed, but none of the townspeople will talk about it. Yet the audience also finds itself watching a Viking funeral, Brazilian politicians, and an Australian talk show. If you haven’t already guessed, this is no ordinary horror-mystery story. This is the Oxford Revue.
Founded by Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame), the renowned Revue lives up to its reputation—The Curse of the Oxford Revue is an hour of comic genius, and the rapid-fire jokes flow into each other so quickly and so smoothly that I’m sure half of them slipped past me while I was busy chuckling at the others. And even so, I never stopped being entertained. There are jokes to please everyone: pop culture references, bad puns, high-brow allusions, raunchy slapstick, and of course plenty of surreal and dark humour. I can’t reveal too much here without ruining the punchlines in the show, but suffice it to say that they encompassed everything from voles to Helvetica to exorcism. To quote them here would be to ruin the humour, anyway, since so much depends on the comic timing of these gifted young performers.
Not only were the writing and the delivery of the jokes outstanding, but the staging also added to the humour of the show by playing around with the conventions of more traditional drama. The opening scene mocked the melodrama of modern theatre, and music and lighting created suspense where there wasn’t really any in the plot, leading to some funny moments when the characters abruptly broke the tension, for example by turning an ominous phone conversation into a pizza order. This tongue-in-cheek self-mockery was some of the most intelligently funny material in the play, and it was a nice counterbalance to the (equally funny) moments when actors stripped down to their underwear or fell over backwards in their chairs.
The plot was not very suspenseful, and the play was more a succession of loosely linked scenes than the horror-mystery it was (jokingly) advertised to be, since the writers’ priority was clearly to fit as much comedy as possible into the show. But does it really matter? The Revue are very, very good at what they do, and when the jokes are this funny, who needs anything more?
Founded by Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame), the renowned Revue lives up to its reputation—The Curse of the Oxford Revue is an hour of comic genius, and the rapid-fire jokes flow into each other so quickly and so smoothly that I’m sure half of them slipped past me while I was busy chuckling at the others. And even so, I never stopped being entertained. There are jokes to please everyone: pop culture references, bad puns, high-brow allusions, raunchy slapstick, and of course plenty of surreal and dark humour. I can’t reveal too much here without ruining the punchlines in the show, but suffice it to say that they encompassed everything from voles to Helvetica to exorcism. To quote them here would be to ruin the humour, anyway, since so much depends on the comic timing of these gifted young performers.
Not only were the writing and the delivery of the jokes outstanding, but the staging also added to the humour of the show by playing around with the conventions of more traditional drama. The opening scene mocked the melodrama of modern theatre, and music and lighting created suspense where there wasn’t really any in the plot, leading to some funny moments when the characters abruptly broke the tension, for example by turning an ominous phone conversation into a pizza order. This tongue-in-cheek self-mockery was some of the most intelligently funny material in the play, and it was a nice counterbalance to the (equally funny) moments when actors stripped down to their underwear or fell over backwards in their chairs.
The plot was not very suspenseful, and the play was more a succession of loosely linked scenes than the horror-mystery it was (jokingly) advertised to be, since the writers’ priority was clearly to fit as much comedy as possible into the show. But does it really matter? The Revue are very, very good at what they do, and when the jokes are this funny, who needs anything more?