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Gareth Tunley as Inspector Savage, Phil Brown as Sergeant Mild
in
THE LEGENDARY POLOWSKI MURDERS
Verdict: Glorious, farcical, unmissable.
Edinburgh - Pleasance Dome - August 2002
Meet Sergeant Mild and Inspector Savage, the Met’s answer to Clouseau -
but without the intelligence.
We’re fellow police officers at the case conference for five alarming
murders. One’s been found with an abacus inserted rectally and,
as Dave Mild (Phil Brown) points out, ‘Officers, it just doesn’t add up’.
Another victim’s a tourist found dead after enduring multiple
performances of the Edinburgh Tattoo. The lads are after a cereal
killer - their only clue's a tape recording from the murderer warning of more
to come. Their only aide is Inspector Savage (Gareth Tunley)’s
dictionary that contains 'forensic' ('I'm off to arrest Forensic, they've
got the latest on the murders, and they're always at the scene of the
crime') - but not ‘felching’.
Mild and Savage’s Met is a force specialist in ‘industrialised racism’
and political correctness (‘What are we supposed to call the homeless now?
Vagrants? Vagabonds?’ / ‘Scum'), who show a caring face to the
underprivileged (‘Officers, if you pass a homeless person with drugs
on your person, don’t give them any; they’ll only sell them and
spend the money on food’).
Meet Superintendent Hogg (Phil Brown) in boxing gloves, ruling with
advice that embraces both the soft and hard approaches to management
(‘Bless you, fuck you’) - and mad as a hatter; Dr Julian Voom (Gareth Tunley),
speech anal-ist with a professional interest in young men
(‘Say Urdu-Aif-Anseem-En. Now say it quickly’). Meet Rohan Mohan (Brown),
flash-bulbing Sun photographer. Meet - the legendary Polowski himself.
Tunley and Brown create wholly believable characters in
respectively Savage and Mild, the two most incompetent detectives
ever to wear mac and shoulder-holster. It’s impossible not to
sympathise with the heroes as they stumble ineptly from one crass
mistake to the next till - inevitably - they triumphantly unmask the killer.
Gloriously unmissable.
END
John Park
reviewed at C-Dome / Saturday 3 August 2002
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008
www.fringereport.com
