Whatever Happened to White Dog Shit

Whatever Happened to White Dog Shit?
Co2, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: 12lb Actor

Taff Llewellyn

The title filled me with dread. It often seems that every failed comic that ever stalked the Fringe has indulged that 'I Love 1972' comedy line, 'whatever happened to Spangles/Chopper bikes/white dog shit, etc' at some time in their miserable careers. And so it was with real trepidation that I, along with four other audience members, waited for the show to begin.

The play - for it turned out thankfully not to be a stand-up routine - concerns Vince Monk (Robin Bailey), an aging, failing comedy turn. He is ensconced on the top floor of the Brahms & Lizst public house, apparently reduced to offering laughter therapy to two hapless youths (Susie Riddell and, the plays author, Paul Magson). The dialogue is fast and furious with vignettes of each of the players' lives interspersed with the main action. Simple lighting variations and musical accompaniment help in the believability of the transformation.

As the play progresses, with each character 'learning' something about themselves - facts and aphorisms which they scrawl on a whiteboard in the background - so the complexity and interconnections of the play unravel. Everyone has 'issues' but mercifully there is nothing maudlin or earnest about the way they are handled. Rather the script is very funny (no belly laughs, but plenty to smile and think about).

There is something particularly English about this play; the central character is too vaudevillian to represent Kenneth Williams or Charles Hawtrey, but effectively the plot revolves around the posthumous revelations of self-loathing that we have come to recognise - from tabloid headlines and exposes - of these stars of yesteryear. From Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Larry Grayson, the tears of a clown device is nothing new, but still intriguing.

However, this is not a real biography but recognition - like the bad joke of the title - is only the starting point as we journey through the lives of all three characters to unravel the reasons for them being together and to understand their own particular stories.

The multi-layered complexity of the play probably merits a few viewings to get the intricacies fully into perspective. The acting is first class, veering from comedy to tragedy; from pathos to slapstick and the writing accomplished, resolving the various strands of the plot very well if not a little clichéd at the end, in the device of the whiteboard. Some soliloquies have some movingly descriptive language, which shines through even the more caricatured moments.

On paper, this play's central theme suggests that laughter is a poor but necessary substitute for the shit that life deals you, could have been a morose, depressing message. Fortunately, it manages to be funny in itself.

30 July to 16 August.