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Recruitment
Stars Group: Julie and Josephine |
| Tim Markham | |
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It is no surprise that this year's Fringe has produced a bumper crop of shows tackling the ubiquitous phenomenon of reality television. While it is fertile territory for social commentary, reality TV is also an easy target for comedy, pure and simple - perhaps too easy a target, given the standard of some of the productions. Talentless, preening contestants and cynical presenters who want nothing more than to present Blue Peter are easy characters to lampoon badly, as is the trend towards more and more banal subjects for these shows. This sort of comedy also suffers because no matter how ridiculous the parody, it is more than likely that television will have served up the same thing for real. It leaves precious little room for satire. Recruitment Stars has all of these ingredients, and as such it shouldn't work. But it does - brilliantly. The premise is that the contestants are locked up in an office for weeks on end, the prize held out before them being the chance to work for one Mr Hand and his Hand Jobs agency as a secretary or somesuch. By the time the show starts the competition has been whittled down to two characters, Julie and Josephine. Instead of being coldly opportunistic a la Big Brother or pathetically enthusiastic in the manner of The Office, our finalists are simply, wonderfully, bored and boring. They eat crisps, drink the odd can of cola and throw up occasionally. It's wonderful. This all takes place on a screen onstage, a technique that runs the risk of distancing the audience as they go into passive TV-watching mode. But the live action - two presenters and two talking heads played by the same actors who play the wannabe office nobodies - is unfailingly engaging. JoJo and JuJu are stereotypes of the worst D-list kind, but the confidence and verve the actors bring to these characters means that what should really be crass subjokes about Little England (it's set in Sidcup), coke-sniffing, lesbian media stunts, and general competitive cattiness about weight and breast size are, counter-intuitively, hilarious. The talk-show pieces are perhaps not of quite the same calibre, but do little to diminish what is otherwise an infectious, savvy and very funny show. 1
August to 25 August.
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