Spoken word hits the GM Fringe! Two local, brassed-off
performance poets paraded their wordsmithery last night at the Fitzgerald as
part of the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.
First on the bill was James Young. He lives in Salford, for which he apologised for, and performed an ode to its underwhelming shopping centre: the Lowry Outlet Mall. This was fairly typical of his oeuvre. His poems were long rhyming tirades without seemingly any commas, semi-colons or full stops, performed with rapid speed in impressively long single exhalations of air. Young is probably wonderful at deep-sea diving with lungs like that, but it did make it a little difficult to get all the imagery: – it is possible to both convey urgency, and breathe!
Young came across as having a lot to be urgent about. He slanged off everybody, from dull office employers to corporate sponsor Aviva, and speculated that is probably why he was playing the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival instead of the Manchester International Festival….. yes, he may have a point there. He slanged off the audience for being in a bar at the Northern Quarter to see the show, and therefore displaying their own pretentiousness. (If it makes him feel better, I once travelled to review a show in a train that stank of urine on the way there, and also on the way back.) He slanged off a variety of right-wing and conservative targets. But he did it all with an earthy charm and bright flashes of humour, and the audience loved him.
Which posed a problem for the headline act: Daniel J. McLaughlin. “Daniel J. McLaughlin: Rant In Iambic Pentameter” is his first-ever self-created show, and he was nervous. He was very smartly turned out in a tuxedo and rainbow plimsolls, but he was noticeably quivering. And he kept James Young on the stage until Young had no more material left on his phone to read out, trying to stall the dreaded moment when he would have to take the stage and deliver some poetry.
Was it now all going to collapse in a heap?
McLaughlin took the stage, posed several times for a roving photographer, checked his text which was elegantly resting on a music stand – and started reciting the “Seven Ages Of Man” speech from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
Once he was up and going, though there were still touches of stage fright, McLaughlin kept his audience engaged and connected throughout a very eclectic set.
We learnt that he is a native of Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, and he brought a number of rural characters to life, including two inarticulate Lancashiremen who communicate in single vowel sounds. McLaughlin is a talented actor, and this is a skill that he can certainly feature more of in the future. He raised his bisexuality, and performed several free verse-style poems based around that. Most memorable was the one about Grindr, and all the classification terms participants use on it. He has no idea what “otter” means. I’ve just looked it up, and wish I haven’t.
McLoughlin is a journalist during the day, and a very well-read man, so we also got quite a lot of erudition in the mix. At one point he came into the audience to chat up the elegantly attractive critic that he saw there with his best Oscar Wilde quotes; and for no particular reason, I’m going to add that when on form he has a lot of charisma, good comic timing, and a very good sense of pausing and changes in dynamics.
His poetry covered such a wide variety of topics it is impossible to cover them all here, but one thing that he proved to be very strong on were poems about petty revenge. Several of the people who have wronged him in life (including his former infants’ school teacher) got their own special poem each, with their real-life name being used. McLoughlin almost screamed his anguish at their bullying to the ceiling, and concluded that the show was excellent therapy for him.
And for the rest of us. I hope he takes bullying-revenge poem commissions.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 3.7.23
No comments:
Post a Comment