Sincerity
at C (venue 34), Edinburgh

Brendan O'Neill

'If I wanted that much fun, I'd read Mein Kampf.'

So says Abe Froman, Jewish vaudeville talent agent, when mime artist Flo Foonster asks him to glance over her latest work. Abe's talent agency is going to the dogs: there is Flo, a mime artist who talks incessantly to her audience instead of staying silent like mime artists ought to, and Skip Roebling, a male stripper obsessed with Sylvia Plath who is too shy to strip. Abe's only success is a talking poodle that is booked for the occasional barmitzvah. Flo and Skip decide to take things into their own hands, and kidnap Abe in an attempt to force him to find them some work. Before long, the two oddballs are performing as an avant-garde outfit and are the toast of the Hollywood set.

Little do they know that nobody takes them seriously and the only reason they're successful is because everyone thinks they're being ironic - that such a bad show has got to be a joke. 'So bad you're good', Abe tells them. Peter Morris' play has some cracking gags - particularly the more risque ones about the Holocaust and being Jewish (at one point, Abe (played by Morris himself) suggests making a porno set in the concentration camps - 'Schindler's Fist'). But the play loses direction halfway through, and the ending, where Flo and Skip end up as agents in Hollywood who everyone wants to sleep with, with Abe as their Oscar-winning screenwriter, is just unconvincing, as if was stapled on as a last thought when the playwright could think of no other way to develop the characters.

Muffy Marraco as Flo is, however, superb, holding the audience in rapture with her hilarious New York, all-swearing, all-Jewish, all-man-hating mime artist. 'Now', she says, 'applaud if you fucking dare'. And we did. For more information: www.allbadartissincere.co.uk