Mark Trenwith Be My Friend is a stand-up comedy set interspersed with short films and multimedia made by, and featuring, the eponymous performer.

Mark Trenwith introduces himself and begins with some slightly hackneyed observations about Australia – both his country of birth and the film directed by Baz Luhrmann. However, things take a swift turn for the better when he starts examining the main part of his set; why it’s best just to be nice to people rather than constantly search for reasons to hate.

He begins by looking at his formative years where, when he was just 10, he was told he “had the throwing skills of a seven-year-old”. The segment is introduced by a video showing what would happen if adults had the same social niceties as young children. The sight of the performer thumping his fists against the floor of a pub while demanding his favourite lager tees the show up nicely and introduces the comedian’s major weapon – a series of ‘hidden camera’ shorts.

Unpopular at school, the performer reveals that he was bullied by a class-mate who was later to become an Australian Rules Football star. The memory of having his biscuits stolen by the young thug has stayed with him and he is out for revenge. A video is then played showing what happened when he visited the sports star, under the guise of making a documentary, and demanded his biscuits back. The shocked look on the face of the former bully is delightful as he squeals “listen mate, I’ll give you biscuits if you get out of my house”.

He laments that the bullying didn’t stop with the end of school and he tells how recently a group of self-determined alpha males challenged him while he was walking home with his girlfriend. “Why are some people inherently mean?”, he wonders. He sets out to make people happier by giving more compliments, illustrated to hilarious effect by a film showing the stand-up approaching noticably-uncomfortable strangers and commenting on everything from their dress-sense to their muscles and other more private attributes.

He continues in his attempt to be friendly when he sends ‘friend requests’ by post to randomly selected people with friendly-sounding names (Mate, Buddy etc). If it works with Facebook, he reasons, why can’t it work by post? The 150 missives, accompanied by a goody-bag of stickers, photos and recipes, fail to elicit a single response - a statistic he displays with much merriment with the use of a number of graphs.

A series of slightly more disparate elements follow, straying from the main focus of the show, including a video about his girlfriend dumping him at a particularly inopportune moment and a bizarre gameshow. But the performer soon gets back to the plot to ask why, as adults, we seem to ‘build up things around us to stop us being friendly’, from video games to personal music players. He ably demonstrates this fact with a film about how his mood is so easily changed by the type of music he plays while walking in town – the denouement of this film shows just how far the performer will go to get a laugh (pretty damn far).

There follows a slightly awkward section where the comedian sings the song ‘That’s What Friends Are For’ using a selection of celebrity masks to mock-up the famous 1990 performance at an Aids benefit in New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The masks begin with the usual pop-culture suspects but the skit ends with audience members on stage pretending to be everything from Bob Geldolf to cuddly alien Alf.

The idea that it is difficult to be nice to people is then reinforced with a video where the stand-up attempts to sprinkle rose petals at the feet of strangers, only to be told by one truculent man to “fuck off mate”.

The undoubtable highlight of the show is the final piece of film which shows the stand-up taking part in a rap battle with a initially-surly American. Politeness and good humour win out over rudeness and arrogance ending the show on a moral and emotional high.

Mark Trenwith skillfully ratches up the comedy throughout his accomplished 50 minute set. His use of video and multimedia adds depth and intrigue (are those people being harangued really strangers?) to the performance, while his puppy-dog enthusiasm and magnetic personality ensures he is able to fly through any of the stickier patches in the set.

The brilliance of the show lies in the good-natured theme which runs throughout, as well as the way he takes a simple thought and stretches it to an absurdly comic conclusion.

Knowing where his stengths lie, the comedian uses his likeability to push the envelope, particularly in the filmed segments. The show is deeply personal and all the better for this, particularly because even in his more flowery flights of fancy the comedian never seems to be anything other than plausible in his crusade against unfriendliness.

Cast Credits: (alpha order): Mark Trenwith

Company Credits: Writer – Mark Trenwith. Company – Mark Trenwith/Laughing Horse Free Festival

END

(c) David Hepburn 2009

reviewed Saturday 22 August 09 / The Outhouse, Edinburgh UK

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

www.fringereport.com