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drinks Monday 4 August 08
Alex Horne
in
EVERY BODY TALKS
with
Tim Key
Verdict: Deft seminar satire
Alex Horne, with the assistance of
Tim Key, ruthlessly takes the piss out of business seminars. It's an hour of deft satire, homing in on the pseudo-science of body language - and exactly how wrong it can be.
The stage is set with screen, projector, table stuffed with laptops and camera, mic stand. The music's Manu Chao's Bongo Bong, and the lads are on.
Alex Horne is tall, short-haired, good-looking and earnest in manner. Tim Key, equally good-looking and earnest, has glasses, clip-board and the manner of a computer nerd unused to daylight. Together they analyse and probe the audience. Tim Key has collected names in advance - especially those called Tim - and ranking under unusual categories begins.
It's The 2004 International Body Language Seminar. Observation of the body's unseen signals - and questionnaires - are used to mistake the look of love between couples who aren't couples, and locate an American's country of origin as 'Not Greenland' - before settling on 'Definitely North European'.
The minutae of those fruitless, pointless, seminars everyone's sat through is taken apart. Alex Horne starts with hand signals for quotation marks, and moves on to show how asterisks, exclamation and question marks, commas, full stops, and every kind of punctuation can be air-signed. Tim Key uses pie-charts and computer graphics in a glorious ascendancy of vacuous science.
It's all technically perfect, to a level most real seminars seldom achieve. All the better to deflate - completely - the whole genre.
Tonight's audience participants include Marcus Haywood, Kelly Lee, Dave Marky, Tim Ell, and Tim Henry, among other Tims. There are group songs too, and fortunately no group hugs.
One for everyone who's endured the real thing, and lost the will to live. For ammunition to endure the next presentation at work, with a comfortable inner smirk.
Cast Credits: Alex Horne, Tim Key
Company Credits: Written by Alex Horne and Tim Key. Director - Owen Powell. Technical manager - Simon Young.
END
John Park
reviewed Monday 19 July 04 / Canal Café Theatre
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008
