Pummel Squad have gained a reputation for their wild, physical, silly, cartoonish, hilarious, idiosyncratic, poor theatre over the last few years, bagging them several Green Room Award nominations (and awards!) for their shows Spring Has Sprung, or The Beautiful Show and Twenty Million Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Their latest, How the King Learned to Live Forever, is their third annual pantomime and it’s my first time seeing their work – and I finally understand all the superlatives that have been thrown their way.
The theatre
collective say they’ve never seen a panto before and that makes sense – it’s
more of a British tradition that hasn’t really travelled to the colonies. But
this show is in that tradition – ridiculous characters, a silly story, bawdy
and slapstick humour and the occasional shout out by the audience in response.
The night I saw it there was a few surprising audience interactions, but let’s
hope with each passing year, the crowd gets more and more into that sort of
thing.
It's the
sort of show that gets you cheering at the end of a perfectly choreographed
routine or a particularly delicious death scene or a showdown with two sticks
that aren’t really swords that seems to go on forever. To have twenty-five
actors on stage, occasionally all at once, is a thrilling kind of indulgence
that can really only happen in indie theatre – because everyone is doing it for
the love and a good feed.
Pummel Squad
write, direct, star, costume design and figured out a general lighting and
sound design until John Collopy and Justin Gardam jumped in and polished it up.
The costumes are wildly elaborate paper headpieces, dresses and shirts made out
of cheap checked storage bags and bucket hats made out of actual buckets.
Squad members
Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta, Harry McGee and Cooper Donald McDonald play a trio of delicious
villains – the Priest, the General and the Wizard. They are part of the court
of King Finger, but they are also part of a plot to kill him. King Finger is
sometimes a sickly looking puppet, but eventually appears in the form of actor
Sam Buckley strutting his stuff. As the king learns to live forever, he
discovers that sort of power comes with sacrifice – but very rarely his own.
For a theatrical experience that’s a mash-up of Shakespeare and the Wizard of
Oz and some Simpsons gags thrown in, the critique of never-ending power is
sharp, but never undermines the feel-good nature of this year-end show.
Actor Molly
Hollohan plays the king’s son, Pinky Finger, with the deliciously entertaining
bravado that you want from the hero of a fantasy action. After her turn in
Recollection last year, I knew Hollohan was an actor to keep an eye on – and she’s
hilarious here. Damon Baudin appears as Death, rhyming his way through the job in which he slay-s, rounding out the actor's trio of excellent performances at Fortyfive
Downstairs this year.
At the end
of the year, and this year of all years, which has been stressful beyond
measure (*gestures everywhere*), rounding out my theatre-going with this
raucous piece of theatrical genius was a real treat. Now I can join the chorus
of people I know telling everyone not to miss the next Pummel Squad show or the
one after that or the one after that. Keep them on your to-do list.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
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